What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions to make them shatter on contact?" The book was received positively by critics. Ethan Gilsdorf of the "Boston Globe" stated that "it’s fun to watch as Munroe tackles each question and examines every possible complication." According to Gilsdorf, "What If?" gives a view into "Munroe’s playful yet existentially-tinged worldview" by contrasting cataclysmic scenarios with more heady ideas, such as examining the effects of a magnitude minus-7 Richter scale earthquake. The "Huffington Post" remarked that "What makes Munroe's work so fantastic is a combination of two elements: his commitment to trying to answer even the weirdest question with solid science, and
Richter magnitude scale corrections, in that for distances less than 200 kilometers the attenuation is strongly affected by the structure and properties of the regional geology. When Richter presented the resulting scale in 1935 he called it (at the suggestion of Harry Wood) simply a "magnitude" scale. "Richter magnitude" appears to have originated when Perry Byerly told the press that the scale was Richter's, and "should be referred to as such." In 1956 Gutenberg and Richter, while still referring to "magnitude scale", labelled it "local magnitude", with the symbol , to distinguish it from two other scales they had developed, the surface wave