Book Review
Page J., and Officer, C. 2004, The Big One, 239 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company, $24.00.
Reviewer: George O. Chandlee, Source Environmental Sciences, Inc.
The three largest earthquakes known to have occurred in the continental United States were in December 1811 and January 1812 near New Madrid, Missouri. The most powerful of these quakes is estimated to have been magnitude 8.3. The event has been described as “a profound shuddering of the earth”. “Subterranean fires threw down the arches or vaults of the earth, abyssal waters combusted, fermented or electric fluid pervaded the bowels of the earth, driven by volcanic impulses” causing a heaving of the ground “upward in coruscations and explosions”. This was an inexplicable catastrophe, “the very world itself gone mad”. Near the pioneer town of New Madrid, the night air became “redolent with foul odor”, and near the mouth of the Ohio River, the ground shook incessantly, as one resident described it. In what was then a sparsely populated wilderness, some 1,500 people were killed. The tremors reached as far as Montreal, Canada. An area as large Texas, centered in Missouri and Arkansas, was affected. This series of earthquakes constituted the “Big One”.
For illustration, it is worth comparing the New Madrid earthquakes with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. A few minutes past five o''clock in the morning on April 18, 1906, a fracture occurred in the rock in the earth’s crust beneath San Francisco. The fracture expanded in various directions, soon traveling at 5,600 miles per hour. It reached the surface in a matter of seconds. The fracture propagated along the San Andreas Fault. At locations on the surface, the ground on either side of the fault moved about twelve feet. The well-known San Francisco earthquake was a magnitude 7.6.
In the book entitled “The Big One” Jake Page (a natural history writer) and Charles Officer (a Dartmouth earth scientist) detail the history of seismology and describe the current state of seismology. The authors translate descriptions of the 1811-1812 earthquakes associated with the New Madrid fault zone into an informative narrative of the historical development of seismology. As an example, they discuss Jared Brooks, an American engineer, who was an early pioneer in scientific seismology. He used pendulums of different lengths and summarized the earthquake history of the New Madrid earthquakes. Brooks was one of the first to develop a scale and detailed rating of earthquakes based on the damage resulting from an earthquake.
John Milne, an English geologist, was unquestionably what could be called “the father of modern seismology”. The Japanese offered Milne, a widely traveled mining geologist, a professorship at the Tokyo Imperial College of Engineering, at that time the largest technical school in the world. Milne lived in Japan for twenty years. Because Japan is one of the most seismically active areas in the world, it was a good place to study earthquakes. He used the same techniques as Brooks, pendulums of various lengths (some up to 3 feet long) so he could measure and record the magnitudes of earthquakes.
The name of Charles Richter is perhaps best associated with earthquakes in the public mind. Richter was an amateur astronomer and used the word “magnitude” to describe levels of earthquake activity. The Richter scale is based on the greatest amplitude of waves reaching a seismograph. The Richter scale does not measure the intensity of an earthquake, which is essentially the damage that an earthquake inflicts. Giuseppe Mercalli, an Italian, developed the scale that is widely used today. The scale was subsequently modified by two Americans, Harry Wood and Frank Neumann and is now known as the Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) scale. It is a finite scale specifying 12 levels of intensity. These levels range from “Not felt except by a very few under especially favorable circumstances” (I) to “Damage total. Lines of sight and level are distorted. Objects thrown into the air.” (XII)
The authors describe how scientists, engineers, and others have tried to understand what caused buildings to be destroyed by earthquakes and how corrective and protective measures could save lives and ensure increased safety. Readers will learn about the Scottish engineers who worked with Japanese engineers to develop new methods for measuring earthquakes, and how that work led to new building codes. Recent advances in ways to describe the severity of earthquakes are discussed, as well as the ways that new studies have generated more precise estimates of the strength of historical earthquakes. The book presents black and white drawings of historically important seismograph measuring devices as well as maps showing areas of earthquake activity around the world.
The December 2004 tsunami has focused our attention on the devastation and global effect that earthquakes can have. Earthquakes are inevitable and, thus, knowledge concerning their cause, effect, and historical impact is important. Thus, this not-overly technical, book is worth reading. The authors present a clear discussion of the science of seismology .The appeal of natural history and catastrophe stories assure the book will enjoy a wide audience, among geoscientists and non-geoscientists alike.
Book Review
Copyright 2005, James Allan Ragsdale (reviewer).
Earth: An Intimate History
By Richard Fortey
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2004, 405 pp. + index $30.00
Richard Fortey has done it again. The English paleontologist, already author of two acclaimed popular science books, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth and Trilobite! Witness to Evolution, has produced a third which may be the best of the lot.
In Earth: An Intimate History, Mr. Fortey takes the reader on a grand tour of the geology of the world, starting at the Bay of Naples with a description of Mount Vesuvius and then swooping from outcrop to outcrop around the planet, finally returning to Italy for his finale.
Some of the finest pleasures of his previous books have been Mr. Fortey’s descriptions of terrains. His technique in Earth is to first describe the landscape of each area of interest and its relationship with the people who live there before delving into the geology that created the terrain. Along the way, he tells the stories of the scientists who, through hard work and trial and error, have unraveled the history of our world.
Mr. Fortey leaves few geological bases untouched as he goes around the earth. His lucid explanation of plate tectonics is woven through the entire fabric of the book as he explains how so much of the form of the Earth is the result of the collisions, splitting aparts, grinding togethers, and subductions of the mobile crust of the planet.
The book describes in geologically delicious terms many of the critical places in the history of our science and the geology of the earth, with chapters devoted to Pompeii and Herculaneum, Hawaii, the Alps, the development of the theory of plate tectonics, the “ancient ranges” of t