To be fair, Italy as well has a long history of plenty of earthquakes. Those Roman buildings have been around for quite a few.Man, some of those pics are scary.
We were hit by a 6.4 earthquake earlier this year, and that caused buildings to collapse in southern Taiwan. And here in Taiwan, we take earthquakes into account when we construct our buildings. A place like Italy, with lots of old historic structures? It's gonna look like a warzone.
We've had 8 visits in the last month. So lurkers, mostly.
Really? I mean, I knew they were logarithmic, but I didn't know it went up that fast. Man, makes those 9.2 earthquakes look a whole lot more scary than they already were.Friendly neighborhood geophysicist reminding everyone that there's a pretty big difference between 6.2 and 6.4. Richter scale numbers are logarithmic, meaning these are exponents. And base 32 exponents at that. So a 6.4 releases twice as much energy as a 6.2 (because 32^0.2 = 2).
Tectonic plate movement energy gets out of hand pretty quickly using any slower logarithmic system. 6.0 is still no slouch, equivalent to the energy released for the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The scale was developed, though, more to give an idea of the frequency of similar events and the amount of damage that can be expected - and "total local destruction" had to be 10 or under.I didn't know it went up that fast.
That's what happened here.Earthquake energy attenuates away from the focus (3D epicenter) pretty quickly, and damage doesn't scale linearly with energy release. Damage also depends greatly on construction techniques and the soil upon which buildings are constructed. Floodplain sediment, for example, sucks. It turns essentially into quicksand. Large buildings are built on steel piles driven to the bedrock, but when the sediment goes to jelly, the whole building becomes an upside down pendulum.
This post reminded me of Tremors.Also, FYI, the Richter scale is primarily for export to media. It's not something we use regularly internally except as a quick gauge. It's not very informative for one thing (other than to say, wow that's big!). For another--and most people don't know this--the Richter scale is empirical and calibrated to southern California. It's based off of needle movement on old school seismometers.