We know an earthquake is severe when it has a high magnitude number. The 1985 quake that devastated Mexico City was an 8. The quake that shook central Mexico this week was a 7.1. But what exactly is ...

Often in these weekly Night Sky columns I refer to the magnitude of a star or planet. The concept of magnitude is relatively easy to grasp. Put simply, magnitude indicates an object’s degree of ...

An earthquake rattled much of the Northeast on Friday morning, with shaking felt across the New York City metropolitan area and in communities from Baltimore and Philadelphia up through New England.

There are a number of ways to measure the magnitude of an earthquake. Most scales are based on the amplitude of seismic waves recorded on seismometers. These scales account for the distance between ...

William Menke, a seismologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, explains. The Richter scale was developed in 1935 by American seismologist Charles Richter (1891-1989) as ...