Another major earthquake has been reported off the Indonesian coast. This one was an 8.2 8.5 (from story link above), which can still cause some pretty serious tsunamis.
Additional Reuters story and more from WikiNews and CNN.
I just hope this isn’t as bad as the last one.
More to come when more news breaks. Comment here if you find any more news.
Comments
Reuters says that 1000 people are feared to have died already and that the toll could reach 2000.
They’re now saying it was a 8.7 on the Richter scale, which is two to four (??) times less powerful than the December 26th quake.
Nevertheless, it is one of the eight biggest quakes since 1900.
It did not result in a tsunami, although this time, precautions were made.
I can’t remember for sure, but I think the with the Richter scale, each .1 increase in magnatute doubles the power of the earthquake… I could be simply mistaken though….
I don’t know if it doubles the power, Rick, but I do know that it’s a logarithmic scale versus a linear scale, so an 8 vs. a 4 is MUCH more than double strength (I think it’s like a 10x increase or something — I’ll have to look at the chart). And it only gets strong faster in the higher numbers.