Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
in; the mysterious and the invisible are believed to be present; and there grow
up among the people those feelings of awe, and of helplessness, on which all
superstition is based, and without which no superstition can exist.
3
Many of Buckle's contemporaries agreed that the longer one lived in a seis-
mic zone, “the less one can withstand the agitation that takes hold of men
and animals in an earthquake.”
4
Buckle's theory divided the earth into na-
tions destined for science and prosperity, and nations vulnerable to envi-
ronmental hazard—a dichotomy still visible in the interventionist ethos
of twentieth-century scientific internationalism.
5
By combining the stan-
dardized measurement of hazard with the comparative analysis of disaster
response, nineteenth-century seismology had an unusual potential to com-
plicate this deterministic geography of security and risk.
Seismic Tourism
in the course of the nineteenth century, a peculiar desire spread among
europeans: the wish to feel an earthquake. it was not unusual for a natural-
ist to refer to “a good, hearty shock of earthquake” or “a beautiful earth-
quake.”
6
According to the American geologist Grove Karl Gilbert, “it is the
natural and legitimate ambition of a properly constituted geologist to see
a glacier, witness an eruption and feel an earthquake. The glacier is always
ready, awaiting his visit; the eruption has a course to run, and alacrity only is
needed to catch its more important phases; but the earthquake, unheralded
and brief, may elude him through his entire lifetime.”
7
The British naturalist
Alfred Russell Wallace recalled his delight at first feeling an earthquake on
Ternate: awakening in a shaking bed, “i said to myself, 'Why, it's an earth-
quake,' and lay still in the pleasing expectation of another shock.”
8
And
when William James left Boston for Stanford in 1905, a friend bade him
farewell with the wish that he might experience “a touch of earthquake.”
9
Such seismic tourism was arguably part of what Aaron Sachs describes
as a nineteenth-century quest for “extreme environments,” from the Arctic
to the Rockies, which attracted “travelers who embraced disorientation.”
Clarence King, torn between the life of a professional geologist and that of
a romantic mountaineer, fell in love with the “unstable” landscape of the
Sierra Nevada, “in every state of uncertain equilibrium.” for King, vertigo
was a state to be savored: “i found it extremest pleasure to lie there alone
on the dizzy brink.”
10
for those who dreamed of a life like King's, the
New
York Times
reported in 1881 on the cost of a trip from San francisco to the
“Doomed town of Hilo, Hawaii,” or “What it costs to see a volcano.”
11
No
