have you experience an earthquake? what's its intensity scale?and richter scale?
Home
/
have you experience an earthquake? what's its intensity scale?and richter scale?
have you experience an earthquake? what's its intensity scale?and richter scale?
Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Verified answer
Answer:
Earthquake magnitude, energy release, and shaking intensity are all related measurements of an earthquake that are often confused with one another. Their dependencies and relationships can be complicated, and even one of these concepts alone can be confusing.
Here we'll look at each of these, as well as their interconnectedness and dependencies.
Explanation:
The time, location, and magnitude of an earthquake can be determined from the data recorded by seismometer. Seismometers record the vibrations from earthquakes that travel through the Earth. Each seismometer records the shaking of the ground directly beneath it. Sensitive instruments, which greatly magnify these ground motions, can detect strong earthquakes from sources anywhere in the world. Modern systems precisely amplify and record ground motion (typically at periods of between 0.1 and 100 seconds) as a function of time.
Magnitude is the physical size of the earthquake (see cross-section below), the length (L) x the width (W) x the slip (D). An earthquake has a single magnitude. The shaking that it causes has many values thay vary from place to place based on distance, type of surface material, and other factors. See the Intensity section below for more details on shaking intensity measurements.
Types of Magnitudes
Magnitude is expressed in whole numbers and decimal fractions. For example, a magnitude 5.3 is a moderate earthquake, and a 6.3 is a strong earthquake. Because of the logarithmic basis of the scale, each whole number increase in magnitude represents a tenfold increase in measured amplitude as measured on a seismogram.
When initially developed, all magnitude scales based on measurements of the recorded waveform amplitudes were thought to be equivalent. But for very large earthquakes, some magnitudes underestimate true earthquake size, and some underestimate the size. Thus, we now use measurements that describe the physical effects of an earthquake rather than measurements based only on the amplitude of a waveform recording. More on that later.