Tag Archives: earthquakes

How To Measure The End Of The World.

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I was researching a fun post about the apocalypse today when I suddenly came across a disaster scale I’d never even heard of before. It’s the Volcanic Explosivity Index, which is a way of measuring the magnitude of volcanic eruptions via the amount of ejecta they produce – not a perfect way of ranking volcanic eruptions, if you ask me, but probably the only one that’s really possible given all the different ways a volcano can explode. It then struck me that it might be a good idea to spend a little while talking about the major disaster scales and why they’re set up the way they are, since it’ll be a good setup for whenever I do get around to the apocalypse, as well as ensuring that next time you read a news report about an earthquake you’ll have some idea of what the experts mean when they say it measured 5.8 on the Richter scale.

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Science Miscommunication.

If you read just about any major news site with any sort of regularity, you may have noticed a disturbing news item creeping into the most-read sidebar: the conviction of six Italian seismologists for not-really-specified offences over the 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila that killed 309 people. I say not-really-specified because the reporting on this has been uniformly bloody terrible; every single article I have read – bar one – has been based off of the same piece of agency copy, with the same points, same facts, and same quotes in each one. That original agency copy seeks to cast the case as one of the Italian judiciary versus science, and that these scientists have been convicted for failing to predict the unpredictable: an earthquake. But it’s not quite as simple as that.

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This Is Why Galactus Likes Eating Planets.


Tectonics. Tectonics. It’s a word that you can really roll around in your mouth, like a tic-tac. Or a tim-tam. Or a tick-tock. Okay, maybe not that last one. Tec-ton-ics. Aside from its phonophiliac qualities the study of plate tectonics and the Earth’s interior is very interesting from a planetary science point of view, because the Earth has some internal qualities that are – as far as we know – unique amongst the discovered planets.

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