Earthquakes are becoming increasingly frequent. On Sunday morning, four earthquakes struck parts of India, Myanmar, and Tajikistan within just one hour, sending tremors across central and South Asia.

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 ...

In the study of natural disasters—be they tornadoes, hurricanes, snowpacolyses, or Florida on a weekday—the event’s magnitude is just as vital to our understanding as its duration and frequency.

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.

Earthquakes are measured on the Richter scale. It was named after Charles Richter, who in 1935 developed a mathematical scale of measuring the relative size of quakes. On the Richter scale, magnitude ...

What is the "Richter scale," and what do its numbers mean? -- R.M.B., Tulsa. Although still part of our vernacular, the Richter magnitude scale is no longer specifically used to rate earthquakes. The ...

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 ...

The earthquake that rattled Californians on Friday night measured a 7.1 magnitude, which doesn’t sound much worse than the 6.4-magnitude quake that struck a day earlier. But it was. The small ...

How do we measure the strength of earthquakes like the one that occurred off the coast of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula on Tuesday, July 29? The earthquake was recorded as having a magnitude of 8.8, ...

The cover of Richter's Scale by Susan Hough features an early photograph of Charles Richter looking like a grown-up Harry Potter. Like much of the rest of this biography, it reveals an unfamiliar side ...