Richter scale

Richter scale (Шкала Рихтера) refers to the Magnitude of an earthquake. Roughly, this magnitude is proportional to logarithm of amplitude of movement of Earth due to an earthquakes or a strong explosion.

Richter magnitude is numeric qualification of strength of earthquake, its destructive ability, characterized in that, that, in order to reduce its dependence on the place of measurement, the special functional of longitudinal and transversal acoustic waves is used.

Various methods are suggested, and they are supposed to give similar estimates of the Richter magnitude. The method, that provides the smaller dispersion of the estimates of the same event by various seismic stations, is considered as "best". In such a way, the competition of various methods takes place in estimates of the Magnitude.

Various methids give similar estimates. In such a way, in the first approximation, one may use term Magnitude of an earthquake without to specify, which functional is used to evaluate it.

Explosions
The Richter scale can be used to estimate of energy of strong explosions by the movements of the ground.

Earthquakes Wiki suggests the table that shows relation of the estimate of energy \( E \) of explosion with the Richter magnitude:

Values in this table can be approximated with relation

\( E = \exp_{10}(6.7+1.5\, R) \) Joule

where \( E \) is part of the energy transferred to the movement of the ground, and \( R \) is the Richter magnitude.

The estimate refers to energy that part of the explosion energy, that is converted to acoustic waves of the ground. At the mixed energy of the explosion, this energy strongly depend also on the condition of explosion: for the underground explosions it is higher; for underwater explosions it is smaller, and for the atmospheric explosions it is even smaller. In such a way, the total energy, released in the explosion, can be few orders of magnitude higher, than in the estimate above.

Keywords
, Magnitude, Seismology,