Article: ON SHAKY GROUND EARTHQUAKE EXPERTS DISMISS RICHTER SCALE.(MAIN)

Byline: Associated Press

NEW YORK You could call it a scandal of the first magnitude, a development of earthshaking proportions. The Richter scale, the venerated measure of earthquake size, is no more.

``There is no such thing as the Richter scale,'' Thomas Heaton, president of the Seismological Society of America, says flatly.

Seismologists acknowledge there's still something warm and fuzzy about the 63-year-old Richter scale, a familiarity that gives earthquake survivors something to cling to, a bloodless measure of the troubles they've seen.

The professionals, who largely abandoned Richter's specifics years ago, view it ...

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