AFAIK, it was done that way to maintain rough congruence with historical seismic magnitude scales, which were more qualitative in nature. Modern seismic scale systems are significantly more scientific and quantitative but you can kind of retcon the historical systems if you set the exponential strength scale to 10^1.5 in the modern systems.
AFAIK, it was done that way to maintain rough congruence with historical seismic magnitude scales, which were more qualitative in nature. Modern seismic scale systems are significantly more scientific and quantitative but you can kind of retcon the historical systems if you set the exponential strength scale to 10^1.5 in the modern systems.