Earthquake this morning over 8,000 times stronger than recent Oklahoma quakes

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The M5.6 earthquake Saturday morning felt across numerous states was much more than a usual earthquake.

This morning at 7:02am, 7 states in the central United States were woken up by a M5.6 earthquake centered 14km (~9 miles) northwest of Pawnee, Oklahoma. While at first glance by looking at the number, this may seem to be only twice as large as a M2.8, when in reality it is much more dramatic. Most earthquake events in this area have been mild, but the scale of this earthquake is much more significant.

A M5.6 earthquake like we had this morning is significantly larger than the much more frequent and mild M3.0 earthquakes. In fact, the M5.3 magnitude earthquake is roughly 400 times bigger and 7,943 times stronger (energy release) than the M3.0! Most earthquakes M3 or lower are too small and weak to even be noticed, but as the magnitude climbs there is a very noticeable difference in both size and power.

The Richter magnitude scale, which measures how large (in size) an earthquake is, is based off of a logarithm of the amplitude of waves recorded by seismographs. According to usgs.gov, “the magnitude is expressed in whole numbers and decimal fractions…but because the logarithmic basis of the scale, each whole number increase in magnitude represents a tenfold increase in measured amplitude.” This means that each whole number step in the magnitude scale corresponds to the release about 31 times more energy that the amount associated with the preceding whole number value.

To find out the difference between magnitude's yourself, try out

this calculator the USGS website provided.

The amplitude (“size”) differences are large, but the energy difference is massive! In the end, it is not the size of the earthquake, but the energy released by it that does the damage.

The Richter scale is actually one of a few scales used for measuring earthquakes. For greater magnitude earthquakes, the Moment Magnitude Scale is used as it is more accurate. Both are about the same in accuracy for small to large earthquakes.

Northern Oklahoma has seen a rise in earthquakes in recent years. This earthquake ties the November 5th, 2011 Oklahoma earthquake as the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the state.