It was an Italian geologist, seismologist, volcanologist and priest. Who was Giuseppe Mercalli and what does the scale he invented measure?
Who was the seismologist Giuseppe Mercalli?
Giuseppe Mercalli was born on 21 May 1850. He studied at the Monza seminary for literary and scientific culture and was a pupil of geologist, Antonio Stoppani. In 1874, he earned a degree in Natural Sciences and then began teaching natural sciences at the seminary in Monza. From 1880 until 1913, he conducted intense research and devoted himself to studying alpine glacial deposits in Lombardy. He became a teacher at religious secondary schools in Monza, for which he also produced text books.
His greatest contributions to the earthquake field were the design of the Mercalli Scale, a very useful tool for classifying the intensity of an earthquake, and the creation of the first seismic map of Italian territory.
The Mercalli Scale
What are the characteristics of the Mercalli Scale? What kind of magnitude does it measure?
The Mercalli Scale is used to measure the macroseismic intensity of an earthquake by observing the damage and changes to the environment caused by a seismic event.
What is the difference between the Mercalli Scale and the Richter Scale?
Unlike the Richter Scale, which measures the energy that the earthquake releases expressed in magnitude, the Mercalli Scale measures an earthquake’s intensity, based on the damage to artefacts and human perception of the seismic phenomenon and evaluates it qualitatively rather than quantitatively.
The intensities it is composed of are the following:
The Mercalli Scale is not defined in relation to physical magnitudes, with objectively quantifiable measurements, such as amplitude of the shock, peak speed, acceleration, or period and, therefore, has the advantage of being usable even in the absence of specific instrumentation and of being able to be applied also to descriptions of earthquakes that occurred ages ago, when there were no seismometers to record earthquakes.
