PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - In scientific fields, numbers are everywhere. Knowing what those numbers mean is easier to understand in some cases, and in other cases, not so much. An earthquake's magnitude, on ...

Earthquakes and seismic activity often happen with sudden movements underground with tectonic plates. Seismographs are used by scientists to measure the time, location and strength of an earthquake.

The earthquake in Turkey that killed more than 3,100 people and set off a series of aftershocks ruptured on a shallow fault line just over 11 miles beneath the Earth’s surface, making it one of the ...

We know an earthquake is severe when it has a high magnitude number. The 1985 quake that devastated Mexico City was an 8. The quake that shook central Mexico this week was a 7.1. But what exactly is ...

The moment magnitude scale (MMS; denoted explicitly with Mw or Mw, and generally implied with use of a single M for magnitude) is a measure of an earthquake's magnitude ("size" or strength) based on ...

Often in these weekly Night Sky columns I refer to the magnitude of a star or planet. The concept of magnitude is relatively easy to grasp. Put simply, magnitude indicates an object’s degree of ...