- Thomas C. Hanks
Thomas C. Hanks is an American
seismologist . He works for theUS Geological Survey (USGS) in Menlo Park, California. Dr. Hanks is a member of the Seismological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, the Geological Society of America, the Peninsula Geological Society at Stanford, and many related geological societies. Dr. Hanks has authored dozens of scholarly papers in strong-motion seismology and tectonic geomorphology. In 1979 the Japanese-American seismologistHiroo Kanamori , professor of seismology at the California Institute of Technology and Dr. Hanks (then a graduate student at Caltech) suggested the use ofMoment magnitude scale to replace theRichter magnitude scale for measuring the relative strength of earthquakes. The reason was that the Richter scale saturates at magnitudes greater than about 5.5, while the Moment magnitude scale does not saturate. [ [http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/geoscientist/page708.html Geological Society - Off the Scale! ] ]References
External links
* [http://www.princeton.edu/paw/web_exclusives/alumni_spotlight/as_012506hanks.html "Quake Watcher" Princeton Alumni News profile on Hanks]
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