Geographies of Hazard - The Earthquake Observers - page 107

fig. 5.1. The seismic hut of the Samoa Observatory, under construction. inside is a state-
of-the-art inverted pendulum seismograph, designed by emil Wiechert. Ergebnisse der
Arbeiten des Samoa-Observatoriums der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften
zu Göttingen, vol. 1 (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1908) ( Abhandlungen
der könglichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Mathematisch-
Physikalische Klasse, Neue folge 7), plate 5, figure 1.
europeans understand the past and present geology of the islands. 71 Then,
in the new century, researchers began to arrive on Samoa in greater num-
bers. They no longer expressed interest in Mafuïé or Tangaloa. instead, they
spent most of their time in a coconut grove along the water, where native
workers were building a set of huts, at great cost and with copious amounts
of cement. The europeans expected the Samoans to help operate the deli-
cate instruments arriving by ship. Neither the Samoans nor the scientists
associated this work with earlier european studies of the islands. in the
minds of the europeans, the Samoan geophysical observatory, founded by
the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, was an institution of “pure learning.”
it was to be a window onto global physics, one that just happened to lie on
a tropical island. The Samoans probably saw it as a profitable coconut farm
(see figure 5.1). 72
German geoscientists came to Samoa in search of “world quakes,”
Weltbeben. They reckoned that the little island would offer a prime view
of the strong seismic waves arising in the Pacific region. By means of such