Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
For the city of Ljubljana, the earthquake was an occasion to modernize.
The reconstruction effort laid bare a conflict between local and imperial
direction, as Andrew Herscher has shown.
48
A similar tension was manifest
in the scientific response to the earthquake. With the city still reeling from
aftershocks, the Carniolan provincial government expressed interest in in-
stalling a seismograph at the imperial high school in the capital. There was,
however, no one willing to supervise its operation until 1896, when the
school hired Albin Belar, then an assistant at the Imperial Marine Academy
in Fiume. Belar had studied with eduard suess in vienna. He spoke Ger-
man at home but also knew slovenian, Croatian, and Italian.
49
In 1897
Belar drew up a petition to found Austria's first seismological observatory
in Ljubljana. He later claimed to have coined the German word for such
an institution,
Erdbebenwarte.
It would seem to be a miraculous stroke of
fortune by which Belar's petition found its way to the direction of the Car-
niola savings Bank, which promised the necessary financial support. But
luck had less to do with it than connections. The bank's director was Joseph
supan (or suppan), a member of the imperial court of justice and one of the
foremost German nationalists in Carniola.
50
Indeed, the bank itself would
become the target of slovenian nationalist fury over the following years,
with supan even facing accusations of embezzlement. supan's brother
Alexander, meanwhile, was one of Austria's leading physical geographers
and the editor of the influential journal
Petermanns Mittheilungen,
where
he had discussed seismological questions.
51
Apparently, an intervention
from Alexander supan had something to do with the continuing support
of the Carniola savings Bank for Belar's observatory.
52
Conspicuously, the
observatory also received the personal support of several Habsburg arch-
dukes.
53
From the start, then, the Ljubljana observatory was implicated in
the debates over imperial authority in the south slavic lands.
54
Belar's interest in seismology lay in instrumental design and the inter-
pretation of seismographic records—in his terms, “the technical aspects of
the science.”
55
Yet much of his work after 1897 involved comparing the in-
strumental records of his observatory with human reports.
56
“It has become
an urgent necessity to bridge the large gap that unfortunately still exists
today between the earthquake observer with the help of instruments and
the observer who relies exclusively on human perceptions, his own or those
of others.” Belar introduced a linguistic metaphor to describe this effort: it
was necessary to correlate the characteristic curves of the seismograph with
terms in common use for the sensations of ground movement: earth shock,
ground vibration, ground shaking, earth movement, and so on. (“erdstoß,
erzittern des Bodens, Bodenerschütterung oder erdbewegung”).
57
“Bridging
