Why are big earthquakes so much more destructive than small ones?

'Spaghetti quakes; why are big earthquakes so much more destructive than small ones?'

 This activity uses increasingly large bundles of dry spaghetti to demonstrate how each unit of logarithmic increase in earthquake magnitude is related to a 30-fold increase in energy release. It is a demonstration of “earthquake energy” using spaghetti, to help students to appreciate the use of logarithmic scales when
measuring quantities with huge ranges in values.

Many more ELIs about earthquakes can be found on our website either through the search engine or by using the alphabetical index.