Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
habitable. . . . Just by these sensitive reactions the planet shows itself to be
alive, and seismic thrillings are the breaths it draws.”
41
For suess, the liberal statesman, the global perspective also stood for
the interests of humanity as a whole, over and above those of individual
nations or classes. In 1888, for instance, during a crest of anti-semitism
and nationalist conflict in the imperial capital, suess called for broad mind-
edness: “Prejudices and egoism, above all the pettiness of the things with
which we are accustomed to dealing with, have placed barriers around each
of us which constrict our view. If they are removed, if we resolve to leave be-
hind the narrow conceptions of space and time which bourgeois life offers
us, and no longer to view the world from the base, self-centered perspective,
which sees advantages here, disadvantages there for us or our species, but
rather to admit the facts in their naked truth, then the cosmos reveals to us
an image of unspeakable grandeur.”
42
suess associated the global perspec-
tive with modernization and ethical progress, but also with the bold em-
piricism of modern geology that grasped “facts in their naked truth.”
43
He
suggested that the mere recognition of the relative scale of the human and
the cosmic could ground ethics in a secular, globalizing age: “There is noth-
ing that raises the individual more completely and higher out of the narrow
circle of egoism, as the thought of the infinite majesty of the universe and
of its eternal laws.”
44
suess's global vision was not, however, a bid for tran-
scendence. He never allowed the extraterrestrial perspective to become an
end in itself.
The human impact of an earthquake remained at the center of
research—as a source of evidence and as a motivation for knowledge.
Seismology Comes to Ljubljana
The Zagreb earthquake of 1880 triggered the organization of earthquake-
observing networks at the provincial level, but it took another fifteen years
for scientists to begin to coordinate seismic observation across the Austrian
half of the monarchy. Political resistance to scientific centralization was just
one of the reasons for this delay. Another involved disciplinary dynamics:
in 1880, the
landeskundlich
approach seemed perfectly suited to answering
questions of crustal tectonics and orogenesis. It was not until the develop-
ment of more sensitive seismographs over the following two decades that
earthquake research would be reoriented around questions of the earth's
internal structure, requiring larger-scale coordination of instrumental ob-
servations. Furthermore, the infrastructure that would make it possible to
standardize observations on that scale was still under construction in 1880.
Railroad time had not yet been coordinated, and many parts of the empire
