Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
How did the nineteenth-century quest for a global seismology lead to
Samoa? What significance did this Pacific island hold for geophysics? Repre-
sentatives of German science on Samoa must have asked themselves similar
questions every morning when they awoke in a thatch hut, fifteen thou-
sand kilometers from home. There was no ready answer. As one analyst of
the Samoan seismic records warned, it was all too easy to mistake a local
phenomenon for a global one, to misattribute a seismograph's jitter to a
reported distant quake.
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When a volcano erupted soon after the arrival of
the observatory's first director, he simply assumed it was of global import:
“for in 1902 the vulcanism of the earth had reached previously unknown
dimensions and now let its fires smoulder on Samoa as well.”
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Geophysical
observations on Samoa gained global significance by the same process that
rendered the island's nearby earthquakes “insignificant.” As we will see, this
was a move to “purify” seismology by severing it from human bias—and
human needs.
