Richter magnitude scale is about 7 and about 8.5 for formula_3. New techniques to avoid the saturation problem and to measure magnitudes rapidly for very large earthquakes are being developed. One of these is based on the long period P-wave; the other is based on a recently discovered channel wave. The energy release of an earthquake, which closely correlates to its destructive power, scales with the power of the shaking amplitude. Thus, a difference in magnitude of 1.0 is equivalent to a factor of 31.6 (formula_19) in the energy released; a difference in magnitude of 2.0 is equivalent to a factor of 1000
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