January 4, 2010

Today in class we took notes on Intensity vs. Magnitude in our Earthquakes packet.

• the MODIFIED MERCALLI SCALE is based on the amount of damage an earthquake caused to various objects
• MAGNITUDE is the whole numbers and decimal fractions

- RICHTER SCALE: ranks earthquakes based on the amount of ground motion

There are many hazards and effects of earthquakes, but some of them are:

• floods (dams collapse)
• rockfalls
• avalanches
• mudflows
• fires (gas pipes crack/break)
• structure collapsing

Liquefaction is when soil becomes saturated with water and it looses strength and behaves as a viscous liquid.

Some other things we talked about were that bedrock is good to build buildings on, and each movement is logarithmic (increased by 10) on the richter scale, but the amount of energy is increased by 32.

The homework was a packet to practice measuring earthquakes by drawing isoseismal maps, and there were 3 short answer questions.