This does not mean there will be 1,000 times more shaking at your home. A bigger earthquake will last longer and release its energy over a much larger area. Each scale measures how fast the ground moves at a different distance and in a different frequency band. Each has its uses, but all are limited because they measure only part of the ground motion. In recent years, seismologists have developed a new scale, called moment magnitude, that avoids many of these limitations.
Moment is a physical quantity related to the total energy released in the earthquake.
It can be estimated by geologists examining the geometry of a fault in the field or by seismologists analyzing a seismogram. Several recent earthquakes have confirmed that these two estimates agree. Because the units of moment are cumbersome, it has been converted to the more familiar magnitude scale for communication to the public. Moment magnitude has many advantages over other magnitude scales. First, because it looks at the total energy, we can measure all earthquakes, large and small, near and distant, with the same scale.