What is formula for measuring earthquakes?
Since seismologists cannot directly observe rupture in the Earth’s interior, they rely on geodetic measurements and numerical experiments to analyze seismic waves and accurately assess severity of earthquakes. The severity of an earthquake can be measured in terms of magnitude and intensity. For that seismologists use two fundamentally different but equally important types of scales. The original force or energy of an earthquake is measured on a magnitude scale, while the intensity of shaking occurring at any given point on the Earth’s surface is measured on an intensity scale. The moment magnitude scale was introduced in 1979 by Tom Hanks and Hiroo Kanamori as a successor to the Richter scale and is used by seismologists to compare the energy released by earthquakes. You can see the equation at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magn… An increase of 1 step on this logarithmic scale corresponds to a 101.
