[goshx]

They upgraded it to 8.4 after.

[legostormtroopr]

I appreciate those kinds of quick release cycles. I'm hoping that when they upgrade to 9.0 we get some new features though.

[seanmcdirmid]

Each point release just about doubles the force of the earth quake. Makes me wonder how my mom handled the Good Friday one in Anchorage, which was at 9.2.

[kalleboo]

Magnitude is a pretty useless scale for the human-level impact of an earthquake (since you have to take into account location, depth, geography etc).

I prefer the Shindo scale in Japan, which better informs you how people actually felt it/it affected infrastructure. Each earthquake doesn't get "one" shindo scale, you get a map of shindo readings for each location it was felt in. Then you can say "this earthquake was up to shindo X" if you want to tell somehow the worst effects of it, or "at my house it was shindo X-2" and people understand "oh so you were pretty far away huh"

[saagarjha]

Actually, it takes around 0.3 to double to power.

[bhrgunatha]

USGS (and most reports use the moment magnitude scale - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale :

Each point is 10 ^ 1.5 (about 31)

Every 2 points is 100

The Richter scale is almost never used now but that'd where the factor of 10 per point comes from.

[bamboozled]

That's a really bad joke.

[iaskwhy]

Actually earthquake quick release cycles are very good for humans as it prevents bigger earthquakes in the future. Same with volcanoes.

[hanniabu]

Yeah, and the longer the time between releases the more likely things are to break

[goshx]

They'll probably add trumpet sounds.

[flukus]

I expect 9.0 will force some hardware updates.