Personal notes on seismology, plate tectonics and the history of big quakes.
October 2026
The Richter scale is logarithmic: each whole number means ten times more ground motion and roughly 32 times more energy. Today seismologists mostly use the moment magnitude scale, which works better for very large events.
September 2026
A rupture of almost 480 km along the San Andreas Fault. Most of the damage came not from shaking but from the fires that burned for days afterwards.
August 2026
Japan sits where four tectonic plates meet. The Pacific plate sinks under the Okhotsk plate at about 8 cm per year, building up stress that is released as earthquakes.