The race to connect the world through satellite internet has created an unexpected casualty: our view of the cosmos. A new ...

Scientists largely use the moment magnitude scale to categorize earthquakes’ strength and size in a way that’s more accurate than the long-used Richter scale, the US Geological Survey says.

The scale has no upper limit, but no fault long enough to generate a magnitude 10 earthquake is known to exist, according to USGS. In some cases, earthquakes can be so small as to have a negative ...

Under 5.0 magnitude: These tend to be I-V on the MM scale. Anything in this intensity range does not generally cause considerable damage. On the higher end, shaking may be felt by many, and ...

Officially it's called the moment magnitude scale. It's a logarithmic scale, meaning each number is 10 times as strong as the one before it. So a 5.0 earthquake is ten times stronger than a 4.0.

The moment magnitude scale, as it is known, replaced one developed by an American seismologist, Charles Richter, that was used until the 1970s.

So a 9.5-magnitude quake — such as the one that occurred in Chile in 1960, the strongest ever recorded — is more than 30,000 times more powerful than a 6.5-magnitude quake, which itself can be ...