Tracking Tremors

A Brief History Of The Richter Scale

Developed in 1935 by Charles Richter in partnership with Beno Gutenberg, both from the California Institute of Technology, the Richter magnitude scale is used to assign a single number to quantify the energy released during an earthquake.

The system operates on a base-10 logarithmic scale, measuring the amplitude of seismic waves recorded upon a seismograph. Being logarithmic, each incremental number on the scale denotes a 10x increase in magnitude - that is, a shaker measuring 5.0 on the Richter Scale is ten times larger as one measuring 4.0.