This article is about the earthquake magnitude scale introduced by Charles Richter in 1935. For a review of earthquake magnitude scales, see seismic magnitude scales. For the musical scale used for tuning harmonicas, see Richter tuning. For the single by EPMD, see Richter Scale (song).
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The Richter scale[1] (/ˈrɪktər/), also called the Richter magnitude scale, Richter's magnitude scale, and the Gutenberg–Richter scale,[2] is a measure of the strength of earthquakes, developed by Charles Francis Richter in collaboration with Beno Gutenberg, and presented in Richter's landmark 1935 paper, where he called it the "magnitude scale".[3] This was later revised and renamed the local magnitude scale, denoted as ML or ML .[4]
Because of various shortcomings of the original ML scale, most seismological authorities now use other similar scales such as the moment magnitude scale (Mw ) to report earthquake magnitudes, but much of the news media still erroneously refers to these as "Richter" magnitudes. All magnitude scales retain the logarithmic character of the original and are scaled to have roughly comparable numeric values (typically in the middle of the scale). Due to the variance in earthquakes, it is essential to understand the Richter scale uses common logarithms simply to make the measurements manageable (i.e., a magnitude 3 quake factors 10³ while a magnitude 5 quake factors 105 and has seismometer readings 100 times larger).[5]
^Kanamori 1978, p. 411. Hough (2007, pp. 122–126) discusses the name at some length.
^McPhee, John (1998). Annals of the Former World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 608.
^Kanamori 1978, p. 411; Richter 1935.
^Gutenberg & Richter 1956b, p. 30.
^"Discovery Project 17: Orders of Magnitude". www.stewartmath.com. Retrieved February 24, 2022.
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