Charles Richter developed his scale using the maximum amplitude (height) of the largest wave recorded on a Wood-Anderson torsion seismograph. It was originally designed only for shallow earthquakes in Southern California, using a base-10 logarithmic calculation to handle the wide ...
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The Richter scale “saturates” (fails to distinguish) between very large earthquakes (above 7.0) because it only measures peak wave amplitude. The Moment Magnitude Scale (Mw) measures the total energy by considering the fault area and the amount of slip, providing ...