Yet another reason not to read the LA Times

Recently I've been willing to sound like a member of the so-called "liberal elite" and decry the newspapers published out West. I followed a link to the following article in spite of my reservations because the article mentioned a geographic change resulting from the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. In the second paragraph I found the following hideous sentence. And really, what does "recorded by scientists" mean? In my book, anyone who can record the magnitude of an earthquake is a scientist. Yeesh.

The quake was the largest since a magnitude 9.2 temblor struck Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1964 and was one of the biggest ever recorded by scientists.