Mercalli intensity scale German geophysicist August Heinrich Sieberg and became known as the Mercalli–Cancani–Sieberg (MCS) scale. The Mercalli–Cancani–Sieberg scale was later modified by Harry O. Wood and Frank Neumann, and published in English in 1931 as the Mercalli–Wood–Neumann (MWN) scale. It was later improved by Charles Richter, the father of the Richter magnitude scale. The scale is known today as the Modified Mercalli scale (MM) or Modified Mercalli Intensity scale (MMI). The lower degrees of the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale generally deal with the manner in which the earthquake is felt by people. The higher numbers of the scale are based on observed
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