Richter magnitude scale Richter magnitude scale The so-called Richter magnitude scale – more accurately, "Richter's magnitude scale", or just "Richter magnitude" – for measuring the strength ("size") of earthquakes refers to the original "magnitude scale" developed by Charles F. Richter and presented in his landmark 1935 paper, and later revised and renamed the Local magnitude scale, denoted as "ML" or "M". Because of various shortcomings of the ML scale most seismological authorities now use other scales, such as the moment magnitude scale (), to report earthquake magnitudes, but much of the news media still refers to these as "Richter" magnitudes. All magnitude scales
Richter magnitude scale distance of the station, formula_23. In practice, readings from all observing stations are averaged after adjustment with station-specific corrections to obtain the formula_2 value. Because of the logarithmic basis of the scale, each whole number increase in magnitude represents a tenfold increase in measured amplitude; in terms of energy, each whole number increase corresponds to an increase of about 31.6 times the amount of energy released, and each increase of 0.2 corresponds to approximately a doubling of the energy released. Events with magnitudes greater than 4.5 are strong enough to be recorded by a seismograph anywhere in the world, so