1999 Jiji earthquake The tremor measured 7.6 on the Moment magnitude scale, 7.3 on the Richter scale, and the focal depth was . The Central Weather Bureau recorded a total of 12,911 aftershocks in the month following the main tremor. The total energy released is estimated to be 2.1 × 10 J, approximately the same as the yield of the Tsar Bomba. The earthquake was in an unusual location for Taiwan, which experiences the majority of its earthquakes off the eastern coast, such quakes normally causing little damage. One of the aftershocks, on 26 September, was a strong earthquake in its own right,
Moment magnitude scale band. To simplify this calculation, he noted that the lowest frequency parts of the spectrum can often be used to estimate the rest of the spectrum. The lowest frequency asymptote of a seismic spectrum is characterized by the seismic moment, . Using an approximate relation between radiated energy and seismic moment (which assumes stress drop is complete and ignores fracture energy), (where E is in Joules and is in Nformula_4m), Kanamori approximated by The formula above made it much easier to estimate the energy-based magnitude , but it changed the fundamental nature of the scale into a moment magnitude scale.