Free QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson Page A
Authors: John Lloyd, John Mitchinson
in seismological circles by the Moment Magnitude Scale or MMS.
The MMS was devised in 1979 by seismologists Hiroo Kanamori and Tom Hanks (no relation) of the California Institute of Technology, who found the Richter scale unsatisfactory because it only measures the strength of the shock waves, which do not fully describe an earthquake’s impact. On the Richter scale, large earthquakes may have the same score but cause wildly different degrees of devastation.
The Richter scale measures the seismic waves or vibration as experienced 600 km (373 miles) away. It was devised in 1935 by Charles Richter, who was also, like Kanamori and Hanks, a Caltech seismologist. He developed it with Beno Gutenberg, the first man to measure accurately the radius of the Earth’s core. Gutenberg died of flu in 1960 without living to measure the Great Chilean Earthquake (the largest ever recorded, which took place four months later).
The MMS, by contrast, is an expression of the energy released by an earthquake. It multiplies the distance of the slip between the two parts of the fault by the total area affected. It was designed to give values that make sense when compared to their Richter equivalent.
Both scales are logarithmic: a two-point increase means 100 times more power. A hand grenade scores 0.5 on the Richter scale, the Nagasaki atom bomb 5.0. The MMS is only used for large earthquakes, above 3.5 on the Richter scale.
According to the US Geological Survey, on the basis of the area of damage (600,000 square km or 231,660 square miles) and the area it was felt in (5,000,000 square km or 1,930,502 square miles) the largest known earthquakes inNorth America were the little-known Mississippi River valley earthquakes of 1811–12. They created new lakes and changed the whole course of the Mississippi. The area of strong shaking was ten times larger than that in San Francisco in 1906. Church bells rang spontaneously as far away as Massachusetts.
It is impossible to predict when an earthquake will happen. One expert claims that the best way is to count the number of missing cats and dogs in the local newspaper.
Britain has up to 300 earthquakes a year but they are so small that the public notices only about 10 per cent of them.
What’s the commonest material in the world?
a ) Oxygen
b ) Carbon
c ) Nitrogen
d ) Water
None of the above. The answer is perovskite, a mineral compound of magnesium, silicon and oxygen.
Perovskite accounts for about half the total mass of the planet. It’s what the Earth’s mantle is mostly made from. Or so scientists suppose: nobody has yet taken a sample to prove it.
Perovskites are a family of minerals named after the Russian mineralogist Count Lev Perovski in 1839. They may prove to be the Holy Grail of superconductor research – a material that can conduct electricity without resistance at normal temperatures.
This would make a world of ‘floating’ trains and unimaginably fast computers a reality. At present, superconductorsonly function at unhelpfully low temperatures (the best so far recorded is –135 °C).
Apart from perovskite, it is thought that the mantle is made from magnesio-wusstite (a form of magnesium oxide also found in meteorites), and a small amount of shistovite (named after Lev Shistov, a graduate student at Moscow University, who synthesised a new high-pressure form of silicon oxide in his lab in 1959).
The earth’s mantle sits between the crust and the core. It is generally assumed to be solid, but some scientists believe that it is actually a very slow-moving liquid.
How do we know any of this? Even the rocks spewed out of volcanoes have only come from the first 200 km (125 miles) below the surface and it’s 660 km (over 400 miles) before the lower mantle starts.
By sending pulses of seismic waves downwards and recording the resistance they encounter, both the density and the temperature of the Earth’s interior can be estimated.
This can then be matched to
The MMS was devised in 1979 by seismologists Hiroo Kanamori and Tom Hanks (no relation) of the California Institute of Technology, who found the Richter scale unsatisfactory because it only measures the strength of the shock waves, which do not fully describe an earthquake’s impact. On the Richter scale, large earthquakes may have the same score but cause wildly different degrees of devastation.
The Richter scale measures the seismic waves or vibration as experienced 600 km (373 miles) away. It was devised in 1935 by Charles Richter, who was also, like Kanamori and Hanks, a Caltech seismologist. He developed it with Beno Gutenberg, the first man to measure accurately the radius of the Earth’s core. Gutenberg died of flu in 1960 without living to measure the Great Chilean Earthquake (the largest ever recorded, which took place four months later).
The MMS, by contrast, is an expression of the energy released by an earthquake. It multiplies the distance of the slip between the two parts of the fault by the total area affected. It was designed to give values that make sense when compared to their Richter equivalent.
Both scales are logarithmic: a two-point increase means 100 times more power. A hand grenade scores 0.5 on the Richter scale, the Nagasaki atom bomb 5.0. The MMS is only used for large earthquakes, above 3.5 on the Richter scale.
According to the US Geological Survey, on the basis of the area of damage (600,000 square km or 231,660 square miles) and the area it was felt in (5,000,000 square km or 1,930,502 square miles) the largest known earthquakes inNorth America were the little-known Mississippi River valley earthquakes of 1811–12. They created new lakes and changed the whole course of the Mississippi. The area of strong shaking was ten times larger than that in San Francisco in 1906. Church bells rang spontaneously as far away as Massachusetts.
It is impossible to predict when an earthquake will happen. One expert claims that the best way is to count the number of missing cats and dogs in the local newspaper.
Britain has up to 300 earthquakes a year but they are so small that the public notices only about 10 per cent of them.
What’s the commonest material in the world?
a ) Oxygen
b ) Carbon
c ) Nitrogen
d ) Water
None of the above. The answer is perovskite, a mineral compound of magnesium, silicon and oxygen.
Perovskite accounts for about half the total mass of the planet. It’s what the Earth’s mantle is mostly made from. Or so scientists suppose: nobody has yet taken a sample to prove it.
Perovskites are a family of minerals named after the Russian mineralogist Count Lev Perovski in 1839. They may prove to be the Holy Grail of superconductor research – a material that can conduct electricity without resistance at normal temperatures.
This would make a world of ‘floating’ trains and unimaginably fast computers a reality. At present, superconductorsonly function at unhelpfully low temperatures (the best so far recorded is –135 °C).
Apart from perovskite, it is thought that the mantle is made from magnesio-wusstite (a form of magnesium oxide also found in meteorites), and a small amount of shistovite (named after Lev Shistov, a graduate student at Moscow University, who synthesised a new high-pressure form of silicon oxide in his lab in 1959).
The earth’s mantle sits between the crust and the core. It is generally assumed to be solid, but some scientists believe that it is actually a very slow-moving liquid.
How do we know any of this? Even the rocks spewed out of volcanoes have only come from the first 200 km (125 miles) below the surface and it’s 660 km (over 400 miles) before the lower mantle starts.
By sending pulses of seismic waves downwards and recording the resistance they encounter, both the density and the temperature of the Earth’s interior can be estimated.
This can then be matched to
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