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HAMSTERDAM IS PRETTY SURE IT HAD THOSE NUMBERS WRONG FOR A LONG TIME

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On with the Richter scale, an increase of one step on this logarithmic scale corresponds to a 10^1.5 ≈ 32 times increase in the amount of energy released, and an increase of two steps corresponds to a 10^3= 1000 times increase in energy. So a 7.0 is 32x the destructive power of a 6.0 and 1000x the power of a 5.0. And I'd always thought I'd heard it was 10x (exponent 1 instead of 1.5) as powerful for each step, a number that is off by magnitudes with each extra step.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale