Tibet earthquake’s magnitude high

AlArabiya English

The earthquake in Tibet, China, registered a significant magnitude of 6.8, categorizing it as a major seismic event, according to Professor Mark Allen from Durham University’s Department of Earth Sciences.  #Tibetearthquake #Tibet

Transcript

00:00It's been reported as being a magnitude of at least 6.8. How big is this

00:06historically for that particular area? It's on the large size that the reported

00:14range I've seen so far is 6.8 to 7.1. I think it's unlikely within the interior

00:22of Tibet you'd ever get something much higher than around 7.5 for the kind of

00:28fault that you see within the interior of the plateau. The earthquakes along the

00:33Himalaya to the south, like the one in Nepal in 2015, they can get higher. They

00:39can get into the high sevens range or even maybe a magnitude 8. And what you

00:44have to remember is that this magnitude scale that the geophysicists use, that

00:49there is a what we call a power law difference as you go up each unit of the

00:54scale. So the energy release in an earthquake of magnitude 7 is 32

01:00times what you would see in an earthquake of magnitude 6 and that

01:04would be 32 times what you'd see in an earthquake of magnitude 5 and so on.

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