On Other Earthquakes

[LegendariumOfLies]

Common enough scenario in fiction Character A punches the ground so hard that an earthquake is felt far off. My question is if Character A does atop a building a tall building lets say 5 or so storeies, do we have to include the vertical height (i.e the height of the building) in our calculations as well?

 

[Blahblah9755]

As I understand it, the factors that make magnitude at distance work for earthquake equations are about how seismic waves travel through the ground and how they spread omnidirectionally, so different materials and structures of the building would require different math entirely since material affects seismic waves, there’s large gaps in the material that the waves wouldn’t travel through, and the waves wouldn’t be spreading out omnidirectional until they hit the base of the building. No idea how you would determine an equation for that though.

Also, note that if this did apply directly, the increase in magnitude would be too low to be consequential. Around 0.0005.