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Incidentally, the usual designation of the magnitude scale to my name does less than justice to the great part that Dr. Gutenberg played in extending the scale to apply to earthquakes in all parts of the world.

What emerged, of course, was that the magnitude scale presupposed that all earthquakes were alike except for a constant scaling factor. And this proved to be closer to the truth than we expected.

I couldn't help but be impressed by the magnitude of the earthquake.

We want a story that starts out with an earthquake and works its way up to a climax.

There is another common misapprehension that the magnitude scale is itself some kind of instrument or apparatus. Visitors will frequently ask to 'see the scale.'

I suggested that we might compare earthquakes in terms of the measured amplitudes recorded at these stations, with an appropriate correction for distance.

I experienced the California Northridge Earthquake of 1994 and the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, and I have thus seen firsthand how terrible and awesomely devastating a force of nature can be.

It's difficult to write anything at the moment, as every week there's a seismic shift in world events.

I think scale is about, in a way, the apprehension of proportion, and all the proportions that mean things to us as human beings are related to the body.

Whenever an earthquake or tsunami takes thousands of innocent lives, a shocked world talks of little else.