An earthquake's SEVERITY is the measure of the ebergy released by the earthquake.?
813517
Yes and no!\n\nYes - the amount of energy released when the fault slips dictates the force of the shock waves.\n\nBut the No is also important.   A deep high magnitude earthquake may not rattle a cup because most of it's energy is absorbed before it reaches the surface.  Where a relatively much lighter earthquake on the surface could cause devesatation.
639292
Pressure exerted by the superior plate "melts" the underlying one
429144
A look at the facts and figures surrounding the 1906 Great Quake\n- By The Associated Press\nTuesday, April 18, 2006\n\n(04-18) 00:01 PDT , (AP) --\n\nThe 1906 Great Quake and ensuing fires leveled San Francisco and was one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. Here's a look at some of the numbers behind the story:\n\n_ 5:12 a.m.: The quake struck at first light on April 18, 1906.\n\n_ 8.25: Early estimates on the Richter scale strength of the earthquake. Later studies have concluded it was between 7.7 and 7.9.\n\n_ 45-60 seconds: The worst shaking lasted less than a minute, by most accounts. Areas of Sonoma County felt it the most intensely.\n\n_ 296 miles: The length of the rupture in the San Andreas Fault.\n\n_ Three days: Fires stoked by unseasonably warm weather raged through April 20, as firefighting efforts were hampered by ruptured water lines and the loss of Chief Dennis Sullivan, who died in the quake.\n\n_ 28,000 of San Francisco 53,000 buildings were destroyed, including more than 500 blocks in the heart of the city.\n\n_ 225,000 of San Francisco's nearly 400,000 residents were left homeless.\n\n_ $400 million: Estimated property damage from the 1906 quake (equivalent to $8.2 billion in today's dollars).\n\n_ 95 percent: Percentage of San Francisco residents who were white in 1906. About 5 percent were Asian or Pacific islander, and less than 1 percent were black.\n\n_ 58 percent: 2004 estimate of San Francisco's white population. Thirty-four percent were Asian, 14 percent Hispanic and 8 percent black.\n\n_ 304: The number of farms listed in San Francisco on the 1900 U.S. Census. These were spread across 8,219 acres.\n\n_ 8: The number of farms listed by the Census in San Francisco in 2002. Total acreage not available.\n\n_ 87 percent: Proportion of California residents who do not have earthquake insurance.\n\n___\n\nSource: U.S. Census Bureau, California Earthquake Authority.\n\n\nURL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2006/04/18/state/n000115D19.DTL
633567
lets break it down mathematically\n\nthe mass of the @ss+the heat of the meat= the motion of the ocean
717054
Try: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/monitoring/anss/ for definitions.
856524
9.5 magnitude, Chile, 1960. Biggest since 1900, modern measures.\nhttp://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/world/10_largest_world.php\n\nNo. Faults or potential faults would rupture before they could build up enough energy to have a magnitude 20 quake.  Maybe a huge meteor impact could cause such an earthquake. It hasn't happened in recorded history.
495359
Depends what you mean by "the 10 most recent earthquakes".  Many tiny earthquakes have occured all over the earth since I started typing this answer.  Do you want the 10 most recent measurable earthquakes in a particular area (around your city, say)?  Or the 10 most recent large damaging earthquakes?\n\nhttp://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/index.html has a map of the most recent quakes in my part of the world; http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/quakes0.html lists them, something like 260 in the last week.\n\nhttp://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_all.php lists all quakes > magnitude 2.5 in the US, or > magnitude 4.0 in the whole world in the last week  The list shows quakes over magnitude 6.0 (big ones!) in red; at the moment it shows 8 of them in the last week.  http://gldss7.cr.usgs.gov/neis/qed/qed.html has a similar list, going back about a month, along with a map.
944523
In some areas of the world the tectonic plates press against each other with some amount of pressure. When the pressure grows too great, there is movement in one particular spot, which is then known as the epicenter. A small amount of movement is a small earthquake; a large amount equals a major earthquake.  It is a terrifying experience to be in a major earthquake -- that's why I moved away from Los Angeles.
444812
the richter scale is only as accurate as the agency that maintains it.  but for the most part they are very accurate.  the only reason i could think of as to the mountains is that the quake was close enough to a natural fault line deep in the mountain
765823
In terms of loss of human life the deadliest was on January 23rd 1556 in Shaanxi, China. It measured 8 on the richter scale. An estimated 830,000 people were killed during the quake.\n\nThe largest recorded earthquake occured in Chile in South America on May 22nd 1960. This earthquake was enormous at 9.5 of the richter scale. The epicenter of the earthquake (the point on the earth's surface directly above the focus of an earthquake) was 60 meters down below the ocean floor about 100 miles off the coast of Chile out in the Pacific. \n\nThe nearby towns of Valdivia and Puerto Montt suffered devastating damage because of their closeness to the center of such a massive quake. The loss of human life was not as bad as it could have been because there were large foreshocks that sent people into the streets. \n\nThe damage from the quake was not limited to the nearby shores of Chile. Enormous tsunamis caused by the quake, traveled for thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, reaching the shores of Hawaii, the Philippines, and even Japan devastating everything in their path.\n\nThe earthquake that occured on December 26 2004  was recorded as a 9.3 on the Richter scale which was just below what had occured in Chile. This one resulted in 275,000 deaths. \n\nHope this helped you out a little.
142274
I like this one  \nhttp://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/neic/
565481
Because the primary 'earthquake' is measurable by a physical realignment of two or more techtonic plates in a specific direction. 'aftershocks' are incremental settlements of these plates, and are not necessarily in he same direction.  Hope that helps!
280851
Since the Richter scale is logarithmic, a 6.0 earthquake would have a relative magnitude of 10^6 (1,000,000), while a 7.0 earthquake would be represented by 10^7 (10,000,000), or ten times stronger.
1099478
Tectonic plates are moving.
1059131
In the sense of an earthquake, yeah.  That's what it is.  A wave of earth moving out from the central point of origin.  That has nothing to do with the wave-particle duality.  In fact, it's best not to think of it as an actual wave or an actual particle (like a billiard ball).
781911
None.\n\nCalories are a measure of the heat content of objects.  If you are referring to the amount of heat radiated by the earth, it would be stated in some unit appropriate to the measure of radiant energy, such as watts or newtons per second.\n\nYou may be able to find an answer by visiting the library or using the internet.
905919
An earthquake is a phenomenon that results from and is powered by the sudden release of stored energy in the crust that propagates seismic waves. At the Earth's surface, earthquakes may manifest themselves by a shaking or displacement of the ground and sometimes tsunamis, which may lead to loss of life and destruction of property.\n\nEarthquakes may occur naturally or as a result of human activities. In its most generic sense, the word earthquake is used to describe any seismic event—whether a natural phenomenon or an event caused by humans—that generates seismic waves.\n\nTypes of earthquakes\n\nNaturally occurring earthquakes :-\nMost naturally occurring earthquakes are related to the tectonic nature of the Earth. Such earthquakes are called tectonic earthquakes. The Earth's lithosphere is a patchwork of plates in slow but constant motion caused by the heat in the Earth's mantle and core. Plate boundaries grind past each other, creating frictional stress. When the frictional stress exceeds a critical value, called local strength, a sudden failure occurs. The boundary of tectonic plates along which failure occurs is called the fault plane. When the failure at the fault plane results in a violent displacement of the Earth's crust, the elastic strain energy is released and seismic waves are radiated, thus causing an earthquake. This processes of strain, stress, and failure is referred to as the Elastic-rebound theory. It is estimated that only 10 percent or less of an earthquake's total energy is radiated as seismic energy. Most of the earthquake's energy is used to power the earthquake fracture growth and is converted into heat. Therefore, earthquakes lower the Earth's available potential energy, though these losses are negligible\nEarthquakes occurring at boundaries of tectonic plates are called interplate earthquakes, while the less frequent events that occur in the interior of the lithospheric plates are called intraplate earthquakes.\n\nThe majority of tectonic earthquakes originate at depths not exceeding a few tens of kilometers. In subduction zones, where older and colder oceanic crust descends beneath another tectonic plate, earthquakes may occur at much greater depths (up to hundreds of kilometers). These seismically active areas of subduction are known as Wadati-Benioff zones. Deep focus earthquakes are another phenomenon associated with a subducting slab. These are earthquakes that occur at a depth at which the subducted lithosphere should no longer be brittle, due to the high temperature and pressure. A possible mechanism for the generation of deep focus earthquakes is faulting caused by olivine undergoing a phase transition into a spinel structure.\nEarthquakes may also occur in volcanic regions and are caused by the movement of magma in volcanoes. Such quakes can be an early warning of volcanic eruptions.\n\nA recently proposed theory suggests that some earthquakes may occur in a sort of earthquake storm, where one earthquake will trigger a series of earthquakes each triggered by the previous shifts on the fault lines, similar to aftershocks, but occurring years later, and with some of the later earthquakes as damaging as the early ones. Such a pattern was observed in the sequence of about a dozen earthquakes that struck the North Anatolian Fault in Turkey in the 20th Century, the half dozen large earthquakes in New Madrid in 1811-1812, and has been inferred for older anomalous clusters of large earthquakes in the Middle East and in the Mojave Desert.\n\n\nInduced earthquakes :- \n\nSome earthquakes have anthropogenic sources, such as extraction of minerals and fossil fuel from the Earth's crust, the removal or injection of fluids into the crust, reservoir-induced seismicity, massive explosions, and collapse of large buildings. Seismic events caused by human activity are referred to by the term induced seismicity. They however are not strictly earthquakes and usually show a dif