Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The 4.8 magnitude earthquake that struck New Jersey on Friday generated shaking that could be felt from Washington, D.C., to north ...

About 55 earthquakes a day – 20,000 a year – are recorded by the National Earthquake Information Center. Most are tiny and barely noticed by people living where they happen. But some are strong enough ...

There are a number of ways to measure the magnitude of an earthquake. Most scales are based on the amplitude of seismic waves recorded on seismometers. These scales account for the distance between ...

THE destructive power of earthquakes is measured in different ways, but the one most people have heard of is the Richter scale. Here’s how the force is calculated – and what it means if you are caught ...

Often in these weekly Night Sky columns I refer to the magnitude of a star or planet. The concept of magnitude is relatively easy to grasp. Put simply, magnitude indicates an object’s degree of ...

Earthquakes and seismic activity often happen with sudden movements underground with tectonic plates. Seismographs are used by scientists to measure the time, location and strength of an earthquake.

Earthquake strength is registered on the moment magnitude scale, which measures how much energy was released when the rocks along a fault moved during the quake. By Henry Fountain Earthquake strength ...

Two hundred years ago, Missouri was rocked by an earthquake so severe it made the Mississippi River flow backward and set off church bells in Boston more than 1,000 miles away. These details help ...

The earthquake that rattled Californians on Friday night measured a 7.1 magnitude, which doesn’t sound much worse than the 6.4-magnitude quake that struck a day earlier. But it was. The small ...