What is the difference between the Ritcher and Mercalli scales?
First of all just before knowing the difference, let us first focus on the definition of the two scales(so that you never get confused again 🙂 ) 1. RICHTER SCALE Ans. The Richter scale was used by seismologists in the past to measure earthquakes. The numerical levels indicate the energy released by a particular quake. The Richter magnitude scale (or more correctly local magnitude ML scale) assigns a single number to quantify the amount of seismic energy released by an earthquake and was originally developed to measure small magnitude earthquakes in southern California by Charles Richter and Beno Gutenberg. It is a base-10 logarithmic scale obtained by calculating the logarithm of the combined horizontal amplitude of the largest displacement from zero on a seismometer output. This value is then scaled to account for the distance from the epicentre of the earthquake to the seismometer so as to allow the value to be correlated with the local magnitude readings from other seismometers in
