The 4.8 magnitude earthquake that struck New Jersey on Friday generated shaking that could be felt from Washington, D.C., to north of Boston. About 55 earthquakes a day – 20,000 a year – are recorded ...

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 ...

THE destructive power of earthquakes is measured in different ways, but the one most people have heard of is the Richter scale. Here’s how the force is calculated – and what it means if you are caught ...

About 55 earthquakes a day – 20,000 a year – are recorded by the National Earthquake Information Center. Most are tiny and barely noticed by people living where they happen. But some are strong enough ...

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - In scientific fields, numbers are everywhere. Knowing what those numbers mean is easier to understand in some cases, and in other cases, not so much. An earthquake's magnitude, on ...

Earthquake strength is registered on the moment magnitude scale, which measures how much energy was released when the rocks along a fault moved during the quake. By Henry Fountain Earthquake strength ...

Two hundred years ago, Missouri was rocked by an earthquake so severe it made the Mississippi River flow backward and set off church bells in Boston more than 1,000 miles away. These details help ...

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 ...

Earthquakes and seismic activity often happen with sudden movements underground with tectonic plates. Seismographs are used by scientists to measure the time, location and strength of an earthquake.

The initial magnitude scale was established by Greek astronomer Hipparchus around 135 B.C.E., categorizing approximately 850 stars into six ranges from 1st (brightest) to 6th (faintest) magnitude.

The moment magnitude scale (MMS; denoted explicitly with Mw or Mw, and generally implied with use of a single M for magnitude) is a measure of an earthquake's magnitude ("size" or strength) based on ...