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Magnitude saturation is when earthquake magnitude estimates cluster around thresholds on a logarithmic scale and can occur when relying on peak seismic wave amplitudes. Body-wave and surface-wave magnitudes are estimated from short and long period seismograms but cannot detect very long period waves from large quakes, causing magnitude saturation. Moment magnitude Mw does not saturate as it uses very long period waves.

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Magnitude saturation is when earthquake magnitude estimates cluster around thresholds on a logarithmic scale and can occur when relying on peak seismic wave amplitudes. Body-wave and surface-wave magnitudes are estimated from short and long period seismograms but cannot detect very long period waves from large quakes, causing magnitude saturation. Moment magnitude Mw does not saturate as it uses very long period waves.

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Abigail
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Magnitude saturation is the propensity for earthquake magnitude estimates to cluster around

numerical thresholds on a logarithmic scale. It can occur when earthquake magnitude assessments
rely on gauging the peak amplitude of the largest seismic waves in each earthquake occurrence.

The body-wave (mb) and surface-wave (Ms) magnitudes are the two types of teleseismic
magnitude scales. They are estimated from the seismic waveforms recorded by short-period
(mb) and long-period seismograms (Ms). As the earthquakes become larger in size, they
generate very long-period waves that reflect the seismic energy released by the ruptured fault.
The amplitudes of these waveforms cannot be detected properly by seismographs used for the
computation of mb and Ms. Thus, neither of these magnitude scales will be able to quantify the
actual size of the earthquakes when they become larger. In other words, the increase in
earthquake size will not yield a consistent increase in mb and Ms as the corresponding
seismographs will misrepresent the increase in the maximum amplitudes of very long-period
waveforms. This phenomenon is called as magnitude saturation (failing to distinguish the size of
earthquakes after a certain level). The magnitude saturation effect is also a concern in ML
computations. The natural period of Wood-Anderson seismograph is approximately 1.25 s and it
is not sufficient for the accurate detection of very long seismic waveforms radiated from larger
earthquakes.

The magnitude saturation phenomenon is clearly illustrated for local, body-wave and surface-
wave magnitudes (two types of body-wave magnitudes are illustrated: mb and mB that are
computed from seismographs of different natural periods –mB is computed from a slightly
longer period seismograph–). These magnitude scales fail to distinguish the size of the
earthquakes after a certain magnitude level. The adverse effects of magnitude saturation show
up at relatively larger magnitudes for Ms as waveforms recorded by longer period seismographs
are used for its computation. The moment magnitude, Mw, is the only magnitude scale that
does not suffer from magnitude saturation for reasons described in the above paragraph.

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