Earthquake magnitudes visualized

The Richter scale for measuring earthquakes is logarithmic, so, as the USGS earthquakes website puts it, "each whole number increase in magnitude represents a tenfold increase in measure amplitude. . . " It's hard to imaging, so here's a startling visualization of the difference in energy by Nathan Becker, a government geologist:

I found this video thanks to Alexis Madrigal's blog on TheAtlantic.com