#I never quite grew out of my early fascination with seismology and volcanology | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

thelastspeecher · 6 months ago

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My biggest geology pet peeve isn't when people say "dirt" instead of "soil", though I have known many geologists and soil scientists who get very upset about it.

No, it's when people say an earthquake was a magnitude of so and so on the Richter Scale. Richter Magnitude is actually outdated and has limitations, particularly for large earthquakes (which I won't get into). The standard used by the vast majority of seismologists is now the Moment Magnitude. There may be some stray incidences of Richter being used, particularly for a small earthquake, but nowadays the value reported is almost always Moment Magnitude.

And yet!

The news and everyone and their mother continues to call it the Richter Scale! It's not! Especially if it's a big earthquake (which ones on the news typically are), it's the Moment Magnitude!

...And that's my biggest geology pet peeve.

#I never quite grew out of my early fascination with seismology and volcanology #that was what steered me towards geology as a smol #but I decided to specialize elsewhere after discovering how much math and physics those fields need #...I'm not gonna explain the difference between Richter and Moment in detail #it's all calculations really. Moment uses more data and better calculations than Richter.#that's all I will say. look it up if you're curious.#I taught the magnitude scales to students so many times in grad school I'm done explaining them lol #I will say tho that both Richter and Moment are better than fucking Mercalli #there's a reason we don't use Mercalli #and it's the same reason the Enhanced Fujita Scale kinda sucks sometimes #it's based on damage rather than actual measurements of environmental conditions #anyways I better finish my lunch break and get back to work #speecher speaks

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