>>>>>>Looks like it could be a big one on all the pacific coastlines
>>>>>>
>>>>>>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12709598
>>>>>
>>>>>This is a really bad one. The quake was bad enough, then add tsunami waves 10 meters high.
>>>>>
>>>>>I learned something I didn't know driving Emily to school a few minutes ago. She said what is the highest earthquake magnitude? I told her to look up Richter scale on her iPhone. She said the site she looked at says there is no upper end. What kind of scale is that?
>>>>
>>>>A lot of scales don't have an upper limit. For instance, there is no maximum temperature, only a minimum. The same goes for stupidity, clearly! :-)
>>>>
>>>>NB! I don't mean you.... In fact, I don't have anyone particular in mind.
>>>
>>>Suuuure you didn't ;-)
>>>
>>>No offense taken. My knowledge of science is definitely not top shelf compared to a lot of people here.
>>
>>There's a wiki site
>>
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale
>>
>>its worth noting that the scale is logarithmic so a 8 magnitude quake is 10 times larger than a 7.
>
>
>Well, Ya - But:
>
>we don't the richter scale - its outdated. Scientists are using (since about the 1970s) the Moment Magnitute Scale. and that one increases about 30 times in strength for every integer the scale goes up.
>
>So, the quake in japan today is about 30 times as strong as the bad 7.(something) quake in California back in the 90's (i think it was).

Northridge. Ken Levy was living there at the time and filed a report on CompuServe that would have been an outstanding piece of reporting in any newspaper in the country. One detail I remember is almost everything in his cupboards fell to the floor and broke except a set of four FoxPro coffee mugs. Even Mother Nature wouldn't mess with Ken's FoxPro stuff!

My brother in law was living a ways up the road in Ventura. He is a good sized guy and said the first powerful jolt flipped him out of bed onto the floor. He said he really thought he was going to die.