BIG earthquakes may be far less destructive than we think.
While a quake’s score on the Richter scale measures the overall movement of the ground, it is the jittery high-frequency shaking that is most likely to make buildings collapse. Data from the best-measured quake to date shows that the more the ground moves, the less shaking you get.
The Chi-Chi earthquake that hit Taiwan in 1999 – 7.6 on the Richter scale – was so big it created cliffs 12 metres high in just seconds, and the ground moved at the highest speeds ever recorded.
Yet while the greatest ground displacement along…
