Hiroo Kanamori
Encyclopedia
is a Japanese American
Japanese American
are American people of Japanese heritage. Japanese Americans have historically been among the three largest Asian American communities, but in recent decades have become the sixth largest group at roughly 1,204,205, including those of mixed-race or mixed-ethnicity...

 seismologist who has made fundamental contributions to understanding the physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

 of earthquakes and the tectonic processes that cause them.

Kanamori and American seismologist Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks (seismologist)
Thomas C. Hanks is an Canadian seismologist. He works for the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. Dr. Hanks is a member of the Seismological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, the Geological Society of America, the...

 developed the moment magnitude scale
Moment magnitude scale
The moment magnitude scale is used by seismologists to measure the size of earthquakes in terms of the energy released. The magnitude is based on the seismic moment of the earthquake, which is equal to the rigidity of the Earth multiplied by the average amount of slip on the fault and the size of...

 which replaced the Richter magnitude scale
Richter magnitude scale
The expression Richter magnitude scale refers to a number of ways to assign a single number to quantify the energy contained in an earthquake....

 as a measurement of the relative strength of earthquakes.

Kanamori invented the method for calculating slip distribution on the fault
Geologic fault
In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock, across which there has been significant displacement along the fractures as a result of earth movement. Large faults within the Earth's crust result from the action of tectonic forces...

 plane by teleseismic waveform with Masayuki Kikuchi
Masayuki Kikuchi
is a Japanese seismologist. He is famous for real-time seismology.Kikuchi dropped out of the Graduate School of Sciences, Tokyo University, 1973. In the same year, he took an assistant professorship at Yokohama City University. In 1976, he earned his doctorate in science...

. In addition, they studied realtime seismology.

In 2007 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize
Kyoto Prize
The has been awarded annually since 1985 by the Inamori Foundation, founded by Kazuo Inamori. The prize is a Japanese award similar in intent to the Nobel Prize, as it recognizes outstanding works in the fields of philosophy, arts, science and technology...

in Basic Sciences.
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