Geoscience Reference
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mitigate the disastrous effects by a more profound knowledge of the seis-
mic phenomenon, just as hydraulic services and foresters diminish those
of floods.”33
33
Like Albert heim, Montessus prioritized the geologist's duty to
mitigate hazards. implicitly, he questioned the moral consequences of an
earth science defined, à la gerland, to the exclusion of humanity.
While Montessus was piecing together a global seismic geography, the
Austrian geologist eduard Suess was pursuing an even more ambitious syn-
thesis:
The Face of the Earth,
his sprawling three-volume survey of global
tectonics, published over the course of three decades. No individual at the
turn of the twentieth century had a clearer vision of geology as a global sci-
ence, and earthquakes played a special role in it. they were movements of
the earth's crust that made visible the activity of mountain building—the
vital process of a planet dissipating its ancient heat and gradually collapsing
in on itself.
34
Yet it was not as a progenitor of a global tectonics that Suess
confronted gerland. it was, fortuitously, in his capacity as president of the
Austrian Academy of Sciences (an office he held from 1898 to 1911). in
that role, Suess was consulted by imperial ministers when the Austrians
were formally invited to join the iSA in 1903. Suess was then in the midst
of arranging the transfer of the Austrian earthquake Service from the private
hands of the Academy of Sciences to the state-run Central institute for Mete-
orology and geomagnetism. As we have seen (chapter 7), Austrian scientists
recognized the need to balance the centralization of seismic research and
response against the decentralization demanded by Austria's linguistic and
environmental diversity.
Writing in a confidential report to the education ministry in Vienna,
Suess argued that “northern” europeans (read: the germans) were inter-
ested exclusively in the propagation of waves from distant earthquakes,
which was “only a special question within the great task.”
Moreover, the
instruments for registering such waves were still imperfect, as the Viennese
physicist Franz exner had concluded after inspecting several european seis-
mological observatories. exner also noted that the study of nearby earth-
quakes required different instruments than the study of distant ones (the
ehlert as opposed to the Vincentini seismograph). As Suess pointed out,
the lands of the southern Alps and Mediterranean had “a far greater interest
[than northerners] in studies of this [local] kind and also a more intensive
knowledge of their nature.” Suess also stressed the practical advantages of
relying on domestic rather than foreign institutions: “the individual investi-
gations, such as the earthquakes of Laibach [Ljubljana] and Agram [Zagreb],
are carried out much better and with an incomparably greater measure of
local knowledge and local interest by the individual states than by a central
