I will warn everyone up front today that I am veering off from politics to comment on something entirely unrelated. While there are multiple primary elections happening today, and I will be watching the returns come in tonight, I think my column from last Tuesday will still serve as adequate commentary on the races everyone will be talking about (one way or another) come tomorrow morning. Instead, today I am going to focus on a pet peeve of mine when it comes to mainstream media science reporting. In particular, earthquake reporting.

Colombia just experienced a gigantic earthquake, measuring 7.4 in magnitude. For the most part, the media has by now learned not to report this as being "on the Richter scale," since the original scale for measuring earthquake magnitude (developed by Charles Richter in 1935) has now been replaced by more accurate and more precise ways to measure a quake's power. But they all tend to closely hew to the numbering system Richter first came up with, which is a logarithmic scale. On this scale, the seismometer readings for a 5.0 quake were 10 times larger than a 4.0 quake, and a 6.0 quake would be 100 times as big as a 4.0 temblor. So the rise in each single digit is significant, because it is an order of magnitude bigger.

If you live in California, you will come to understand this personally. A quake of 3.0 or smaller is (for the most part) too small to even be felt. Maybe if you're standing right on top of it, you may feel minor shaking, but anything below 3.0 is usually only ever noticed by scientists. A quake in the range of 3.0 to 4.0 can be felt (usually), but it's not until you get into the range of 4.0 to 5.0 that quakes become big enough to actually cause major damage. Above 5.0 is what you'd call a "big" quake (or at least a "medium" quake). A quake above 6.0 will likely be worldwide news.

The largest earthquake I personally ever experienced was initially pegged at 7.1, but was later downgraded to 6.9. That's not just big, that's really big. It was the 1989 Loma Prieta quake that the sporting world saw happen live, since the broadcast of Game 3 of the World Series had just begun when it hit (Bay Area residents amusingly point out that the tension of the opposing fans in the "subway series" between the Oakland A's and the San Francisco Giants "tore the Bay apart").

[I should mention that I previously wrote about my personal experiences on the 25th anniversary of the quake, if anyone's interested. Also, coincidentally, Loma Prieta's 37th anniversary will happen next Monday.]

All kidding aside, though, having lived through a near-7.0 quake, what always annoys me in reading stories of big earthquakes elsewhere in the world is one glaring piece of data that somehow invariably gets omitted from the headlines, namely: how long did it last?

This is an incredibly important factor in understanding the power of an earthquake, which is why it is maddening that the news reporters just blithely ignore it. Most quakes -- even moderately big ones -- last only a few seconds. There is usually one big jolt, and then a little swaying afterwards, and perhaps a secondary jolt, but that's usually it. The entire experience is usually only a few seconds long, if that. Quakes happen so quickly that people don't even have time to react -- all that advice about standing under a doorway or under a table or getting out of the building don't even kick in until after the quake is over. Again, this has been my own personal experience after having lived in California for many decades now. Every single quake I have felt (too many to count, roughly about one per year I would estimate) has lasted -- at the absolute most -- for five seconds or less.

Except Loma Prieta. That quake lasted 17 seconds. That may not sound like a lot. It's not that enormous an amount of time, after all. But picture the Earth heaving and jumping and jolting -- and then slowly count to 17 -- and you'll see that it is actually quite a long period for such a scary experience.

Duration matters a great deal in earthquakes because it can mean the difference in a quake that causes minimal damage and one that causes multiple buildings to collapse. It's pretty easy to understand why. If a quake is one (or perhaps two) big jolts and that's it, then buildings shudder and then usually settle right back down.

Now think of a pendulum. The easiest example is from when you were a child, starting up on a swingset. You pump your feet to and fro to get the swing going, and eventually you have worked the pendulum (of you and the swing) into a satisfyingly large arc. That's what longer quakes do to buildings. They don't just sway once, they build up a back-and-forth oscillation sometimes to the point where it tears the building apart. Even buildings built to withstand earthquakes can only take so much of this swaying. But such violent swaying takes time to build up. This is why duration is so critical to understanding a quake's power.

Most news stories that reported on the quake in Colombia didn't even mention duration. The New York Times article on the quake doesn't mention it at all, and even though they created a separate article with a map and some scientific information, this article also inexplicably doesn't mention duration anywhere. This isn't the only example. TIME magazine's article is also mum on duration. So is NBC News, the BBC, and the AP. Even the Wikipedia page on the quake barely mentions it at all -- after explaining in great detail the tectonic plate action involved and the seismology, there is a section on the quake itself and down towards the bottom of it, one brief mention: "The quake was estimated to have lasted for around two minutes." That's it.

This seems like a pretty crucial piece of this story that pretty much every major news organization is just completely ignoring. This quake -- a 7.4 monstrosity -- lasted for two full minutes. Think about that. Think about the Earth moving so violently it is hard to stand up without falling down for two whole minutes. Most of us won't even click on a cute cat video on social media if we see it lasts longer than one minute, because we consider that too much time to spend. Put it in that context and maybe it's easier to relate what an eternity two minutes can be.

But, again, this critical fact is completely absent from the reporting. Why? I have no idea. Perhaps it is because most news reporters (even science reporters) have never actually felt an earthquake themselves? That is just a wild guess, but it seems plausible.

News of this quake is going to dominate the airwaves for days, so perhaps in the subsequent reports we'll eventually get quotes from some people who lived through it that explain to the rest of the world how long this quake lasted. And then maybe some intrepid science reporters will pick up on it and explain how two full minutes of the Earth jumping around is not the same thing as one big jolt -- or even 17 seconds of jolting. This seems like a much more pertinent fact to include than, say, the depth of the earthquake underground (which is always included in the reports, even though it is really meaningful only to scientists). Because speaking from personal experience, the question that always immediately springs to my mind whenever I hear news reports on a new earthquake is: "How long did it last?" Which is why it is so astonishing that this question almost always goes unanswered by the mainstream media.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant