A Brief History of Seismology to 1910


Would you believe that giant snakes, turtles, catfish, or spiders live underneath the ground, and it is their movements that create
earthquakes? Maybe you wouldn't, but your ancestors did. Ancient peoples had many fanciful explanations for earthquakes,
usually involving something large and restless living beneath the earth's surface.

Aristotle was one of the first to attempt an explanation of earthquakes based on natural phenomena. He postulated that winds
within the earth whipped up the occasional shaking of the earth's surface.

Empirical observations of the effects of earthquakes were rare, however, until 1750, when England was uncharacteristically
rocked by a series of five strong earthquakes. These earthquakes were followed on Sunday, November 1, 1755, by a cataclysmic shock and tsunami that killed an estimated 70,000 people, leveling the city of Lisbon, Portugal, while many of its residents were in church. This event marks the beginning of the modern era of seismology, prompting numerous studies into the effects, locations,and timing of earthquakes.

Prior to the Lisbon earthquake, scholars had looked almost exclusively to Aristotle, Pliny, and other ancient classical sources for explanations of earthquakes. Following the Lisbon earthquake, this attitude was jettisoned for one that stressed ideas based on modern observations. Cataloging of the times and locations of earthquakes and studying the physical effects of earthquakes began in earnest, led by such people as John Michell in England and Elie Bertrand in Switzerland.

The hundred or so years following the Lisbon earthquake saw sporadic but increasing studies of earthquake phenomena. These
efforts were often spurred on by earthquake catastrophes, such as the 1783 Calabrian earthquakes that killed 35,000 people in the southern toe of Italy.

As communication between various parts of the world became more common, earthquake observations from throughout the world could be combined. Following an earthquake in Chile in 1822, the author Maria Graham reported systematic changes in theelevation of the Chilean coastline. Observations of coastline changes were confirmed following the 1835 Chilean earthquake by Robert FitzRoy, captain of the H.M.S. Beagle, while Charles Darwin was onshore examining the geology of the Andes.
In the 1850s, 60s, and 70s, three European contemporaries made cornerstone efforts in seismology. Robert Mallet, an engineer born in Dublin who designed many of London's bridges, measured the velocity of seismic waves in the earth using explosions of gunpowder. His idea was to look for variations in seismic velocity that would indicate variations in the properties of the earth. This same method is still used today, for example in oil field exploration. Robert Mallet was also one of the first to estimate the depth of an earthquake underground.

At the same time as Mallet was setting off explosions of gunpowder in England, Alexis Perrey, in France, was making quantitative analyses of catalogs of earthquakes. He was looking for periodic variations of earthquakes with the seasons and with lunarphases. And in Italy, Luigi Palmieri invented an electromagnetic seismograph, one of which was installed near Mount Vesuviusand another at the University of Naples. These seismographs were the first seismic instruments capable of routinely detecting earthquakes imperceptible to human beings.

The foregoing work set the stage for the late 1800s and early 1900s, when many fundamental advances in seismology would be made. In Japan, three English professors, John Milne, James Ewing, and Thomas Gray, working at the Imperial College of Tokyo, invented the first seismic instruments sensitive enough to be used in the scientific study of earthquakes.

In the United States, Grove Karl Gilbert, after studying the fault scarp from the 1872 Owens Valley, California earthquake,
concluded that the faults were a primary feature of earthquakes, not a secondary one. Until his time, most people thought that
earthquakes were the result of underground explosions and that faults were only a result of the explosion, not a primary feature of earthquakes.

Also in the United States, Harry Fielding Reid took Gilbert's work one step further. After examining the fault trace of the 1906
San Francisco earthquake, Reid deduced that earthquakes were the result of the gradual buildup of stresses within the earth
occurring over many years. This stress is due to distant forces and is eventually released violently during an earthquake, allowing the earth to rapidly rebound after years of accumulated strain.

The late 1800s and early 1900s also saw scientific inquiry into earthquakes begun by Japanese researchers. Seikei Sekiya became the first person to be named a professor in seismology; he was also one of the first people to quantitatively analyse seismicrecordings from earthquakes. Another famous Japanese researcher from that time is Fusakichi Omori, who, among other work, studied the rate of decay of aftershock activity following large earthquakes. His equations are still in use today.

The twentieth century has seen an increased interest in the scientific study of earthquakes, too involved to discuss here. It should be noted, however, that research into earthquakes has broadened and contributions now come from numerous areas affected by earthquakes, including Japan, the United States, Europe, Russia, Canada, Mexico, China, Central and South America, New Zealand, and Australia, among others.


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