Word: richter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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FOOTNOTE: *All magnitudes here are given on the moment magnitude scale, a more precise measure of earthquake energy that has largely replaced the Richter scale...
...anything positive can be said about the strongest earthquake to hit California in 40 years, it's that it chose a relatively good place and time to strike. Sunday's powerful early-morning jolt -- 7.4 on the Richter scale in contrast to 7.1 for the 1989 San Francisco Bay area quake -- shook people from their beds and houses from their foundations and was felt as far away as Colorado and Washington. But it was centered in the sparsely populated Mojave Desert, some 100 miles east of Los Angeles. A second quake, with a Richter rating of 6.5, struck an even...
...residents of the Turkish city of Erzincan (pop. 150,000), death visited with savage abruptness at 7:20 p.m. last Friday. An earthquake that registered at least 6.2 on the Richter scale leveled 200 buildings, leaving more than 500 people dead -- the toll could climb well past 1,000 -- and at least 2,000 injured. "All of a sudden I saw the wall coming down and the city swinging like a cradle," said Ahmet Elden, whose wife and four children were trapped in their wrecked apartment. "I can still hear the cries of my son calling...
Restoring an ecosystem is somewhat like restoring a house or piece of antique furniture. "Before you begin," observes Holly Richter, a consultant with the Nature Conservancy in Boulder, "you need to know what the original looked like." Historical records can provide valuable insights. Passages from the Old Testament, for instance, have helped Israeli restorationists re-create biblical landscapes at Neot Kedumim, a 220-hectare (545-acre) nature reserve in the Judean hills. In similar fashion, the diaries of a 19th century doctor have provided Illinois ecologists with a list of plants that once flourished under the light shade...
...covered by a marshy grassland unique to the Southwest. But the presence of corn pollen indicated that 500 years ago, Native Americans had farmed the site. "So do we restore this area to the way it was before the Native Americans disturbed it?" wonders the Nature Conservancy's Richter. "If it's not natural now, then when...