How earthquakes are measured: Demonstrating magnitude

My name is Dr. Olivia Castellini, and I’m an exhibit developer at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. An earthquake is an intense shaking of the Earth’s surface. This is caused by movement of the tectonic plates. The strength of an earthquake can be described in two different ways, with the magnitude and the intensity. The magnitude of an earthquake is a measure of the energy that is released when the Earth’s crust shifts. The magnitude scale is a numeric scale from one to nine, with one being the least severe and nine being the most severe. The intensity of the earthquake take in factors like the distance from the center of the Earthquake and the amount of shaking and damage to structures in the area. The intensity of an earthquake can vary depending on how far away from the epicenter and the impacts that the earthquake has on structures and the ground in the area. So, one single earthquake can have one magnitude but multiple intensities.

Every step in the scale of magnitude represents thirty times more energy released in the earthquake. Now, we can demonstrate that using pasta. So, let’s say I had a magnitude five earthquake. That’s represented by my single strand of pasta. So if I hold the pasta, it takes not much energy on my part, not much energy to break that strand of pasta. So a magnitude six earthquake represents thirty times more energy than the magnitude five. So I have here thirty strands of pasta. So if we bring these together, we see it’s gonna take a little bit more effort than the single strand. If we jump up again to a magnitude seven, that’s another thirty times more energy. So here I have nine hundred strands of pasta. So this is going to require quite a bit more energy to try to break. So, let’s see what happens. So I wasn’t able to break it, but it did require a lot more effort than even one magnitude down with a magnitude six earthquake.

Earthquakes are major events that can affect very large areas, and it can be hard to understand these phenomena because they are so big and they release so much energy and can have so many impacts on people and structures. So these are simple ways that we can start to understand the magnitude and the impact of earthquakes.