Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Telling Global Stories
How did scientists weave the idiosyncratic content of such correspondence
into a publishable account of a geophysical phenomenon? In part, the chal-
lenge was to tell a convincing story: to stitch the partial reports of individual
observers into a narrative of the earthquake. one approach was to reinter-
pret personal experiences as communal. Thus, Schardt once recounted that
sleepers were jerked awake with the “impression of being instantaneously
suspended before coming back into contact with the mattress. . . . There
were many who went to find the cause in one or another floor of their
house, entirely surprised to find there tenants busy with the same investiga-
tion.”
113
Another tactic was to transfer the quality of seismic “sensitivity”
from individuals to places. The church tower of Morges, for instance, was a
“seismophone of the first rank; its bells ring every time that a seismic wave
passes underneath.” Various lakes and springs had also become known as
natural earthquake detectors. one area of the Neuchâtel Lake was consid-
ered an “entirely peculiar point of pulsation” after school children spotted
waves of fifty to sixty centimeters during the earthquake of 1898.
114
forel
explained this effect by analogy to the Chladni figures formed by vibrating
membranes, thus certifying the lake's status as seismically sensitive.
115
Attributing experiences to communities and places rather than individu-
als was one way to move between felt reports and earth physics. Another was
to embed local phenomena in larger-scale narratives. As the commission ex-
plained in 1888, “The longer the observations persist, the more clearly cer-
tain lines of dislocation in Switzerland become noticeable, along which the
tremors are far more numerous than in other places.”
116
Three years before
the founding of the Earthquake Commission, in 1876, a weak earthquake
had piqued the interest of the Neuchâtelois. At the local scientific society,
the event was described as an
Einsturzbeben,
caused by the collapse of un-
derground caves as water seeped into them. A local geologist had deemed it
an “essentially Jurassic phenomenon.”
117
After three decades of nationwide
earthquake observation, however, scientists recognized Neuchâtel to be part
of a tectonically active area.
118
They reinterpreted “Jurassic” quakes as tec-
tonic in origin, the consequence of a planetary process of contraction.
As they developed a picture of global tectonics, commission members
looked to correlate Swiss earthquakes with reports from abroad. The push
for global narratives was evident in the Swiss response to the Messina earth-
quake of 1908—the most deadly in European history, claiming over sixty
thousand lives. Across central Europe, the disaster drew sympathy and aid;
