A 6.8 Mw earthquake strikes the Uttarkashi region of India, killing more than 1,000 people.

The moment magnitude scale is a measure of an earthquake's magnitude based on its seismic moment. Mw was defined in a 1979 paper by Thomas C. Hanks and Hiroo Kanamori. Before Hanks and Kanamori (1979), Kanamori (1977) developed Mw scale for large earthquakes above 7.5. Thus Mw and M are not the same mathematicallly even they are considered the same. Similar to the local magnitude/Richter scale (ML) defined by Charles Francis Richter in 1935, it uses a logarithmic scale; small earthquakes have approximately the same magnitudes on both scales. Despite the difference, news media often use the term "Richter scale" when referring to the moment magnitude scale.