Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

The reason for this vast difference in impact despite an apparently small increase in magnitude is that the Richter scale expresses size in terms of orders of magnitude. So an increase of one unit actually means an increase of one order of magnitude, so that a 6.7 earthquake is actually 10 times the size of a 5.7