Jul 11, 2014. 1  Summertime is wedding time, so to commemorate the season, Spotify looked at thousands of wedding-themed playlists to determine the 10 most popular first dance songs. So, not a totally scientific round-up, but the results do seem to be pretty accurate based on our own not-so-scientific assessments.
Surface waves (e.g. Rayleigh waves, Love waves) that produce vertical motion of the ground surface produce the most damage during an earthquake.
How does the earthquake compare with others? This was the sixth largest earthquake in the world since 1900, when seismological records began. The most devastating earthquake to strike Japan was in 1923, when a magnitude 7.9 tremor devastated Tokyo and Yokohama and killed an estimated 142,800 people. The Kobe earthquake in 1995 was a magnitude 6.9 and caused more than 5,000 deaths and injured 36,000 others. The earthquake that wrecked Christchurch in New Zealand last month was a magnitude 6.3 event. Around 30 times more energy is released as the magnitude of an earthquake increases one unit, for example from magnitude 8 to 9. Why is the area so prone to earthquakes? The Pacific plate moves fast in tectonic terms, at a rate of 9cm (3.5 inches) a year.