User blog comment:EightOhEight/TSUNAMI!/@comment-1142365-20100227232746

I'm sitting in my bed, 11:20 PM, watching the news about that quake. 8.8 Mw on the seismic scale. In case you didn't know, the Haiti earthquake was 7.0 Mw. The scale works quite strangely, it is logarithmic, so each whole number up on the scale means there is an increase in amplitude by a factor of 10 and an increase in energy by a factor of 31. something. So for example a quake of 9.0 Mw would have 31.something times more energy that a quake of 8.0Mw, and around 1000 times more energy than a quake of 7.0Mw. So as you can imagine this quake was massively more powerful than the quake in Haiti, except this quake was some distance from any major towns, but close enough to cause some pretty heavy damage.