The Richter Scale

earthquakes · measurement · geology · science

Invented in 1935. Charles Richter and Beno Gutenberg created this scale together and published it in a famous paper that same year. It became the go-to way for scientists to talk about earthquake strength.

Uses numbers to compare. The Richter scale gives earthquakes a number rating so scientists everywhere can compare them fairly, kind of like how we rate movies on a scale of 1 to 10.

Also called local magnitude. Later, scientists renamed it the local magnitude scale (or ML for short) because they discovered new ways to measure earthquakes, but the original Richter name stuck around.

Measures energy released. The scale actually measures the strength and energy of the ground shaking during an earthquake, captured by special instruments called seismographs.