Earthquakes in New York are even rarer than snowfall in Los Angeles. The one that struck the East Coast last Friday was one of the largest in the region in a century. And yet on the grand scale of things — no longer the Richter scale, by the way, but the Moment Magnitude Scale — it was relatively minor, with a magnitude of 4.8. The MMS is exponential: A 5.0-magnitude quake is the equivalent of 475 tons of TNT exploding, while 6.0 equals 15,000 tons, and 7.0 is 475,000 tons. While this quake and... Read this story
