The accord, which must be approved by the House and the Senate, would avert a potentially cataclysmic default on the governmentâs debt and dispenses with perhaps the most divisive issue in the capital just before Speaker John A. Boehner is expected to turn over his gavel to Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin.
The Richter Scale. The Richter magnitude scale was developed in 1935 by Charles F. Richter of the California Institute of Technology as a mathematical device to compare the size of earthquakes. The magnitude of an earthquake is determined from the logarithm of the amplitude of waves recorded by seismographs.n the Richter Scale, magnitude is expressed in whole numbers and decimal fractions. For example, a magnitude 5.3 might be computed for a moderate earthquake, and a strong earthquake might be rated as magnitude 6.3.
The familiar Richter scale (which is not a physical device but rather a mathematical formula) is no longer widely used by scientists or the media to report an earthquake's size. Today, an earthquake's size is typically reported simply by its magnitude, which is a measure of the size of the earthquake's source, where the ground began shaking. While there are many modern scales used to calculate the magnitude, the most common is the moment magnitude, which allows for more precise measurements of large earthquakes than the Richter scale.