Why the Richter scale is a scientific ghost that still haunts modern news reports

Nature · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: The Richter scale is a household name, yet it has been obsolete for decades. Devised in 1935 to compare moderate earthquakes in California, it fails to measure the world's largest tremors accurately. While news outlets still use the term, seismologists have long since moved on to more precise, energy-based metrics.

In 1935, American seismologists Charles F. Richter and Beno Gutenberg introduced a quantitative method to compare the magnitude of earthquakes. By measuring the logarithm of the peak amplitude recorded on a Wood-Anderson seismograph, they created a standardized way to rank temblors. This system was specifically calibrated for local events in southern California, with epicenters within 600 kilometers of the recording station. Because the scale is logarithmic, each whole-number increase represents a ten-fold rise in wave amplitude and approximately 31 times more energy released.

Despite its utility for moderate quakes between magnitude 3 and 7, the original scale suffers from a phenomenon called saturation. When earthquakes exceed magnitude 6.5, the seismic waves cluster in a way that makes the Richter scale unreliable, consistently underestimating the total energy released. Furthermore, the scale cannot account for the total displacement of a fault or the massive energy of truly great earthquakes. By the late 1970s, seismologists Hiroo Kanamori and Thomas C. Hanks developed the moment magnitude scale, which calculates seismic moment—the product of fault displacement and the force required to move it—to provide a more accurate global standard.

Today, the Richter scale is largely a historical artifact. Modern seismographs can even detect negative magnitudes, as they are far more sensitive than the instruments available in the 1930s. While news media frequently use the term as a catch-all for any earthquake measurement, scientific authorities have replaced it with more robust methods. The moment magnitude scale has become the global standard because it avoids the saturation issues of its predecessor, allowing scientists to accurately quantify the most destructive events on Earth without the distance or instrument limitations that constrained Richter's original work.

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