One small nitpick: if earthquakes were still measured on the Richter scale, the difference between 8.2 and 8.9 would be 5 times (as stated in the corrected article). However, the USGS uses the Moment magnitude scale (M_w, see http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/glossary.php#magnitud... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale for details), so the difference between an 8.2 and an 8.9 is 11.2 times--more than double the stated increase. And now that the magnitude has been adjusted to 9.0 (see http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/us...), the amount of energy released was 15.8 times more than an 8.2 earthquake.