Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
make a global catalog impossible. For example, the iSA's catalogs for 1903
and 1904 reported only a few dozen Chilean seisms. Meanwhile, improve-
ments in the Chilean service meant that the catalogs for 1906 to 1908 would
need to list 1,888 separate events for this country alone. “i am firmly con-
vinced precisely by the experience i have acquired in this genre of research,”
Montessus attested. A global catalog would soon be a hopeless task: “Once
the efforts of the international Seismological Association have produced
their effect, that is to say that macroseismic and microseismic observations
have developed on the surface of the globe with the necessary fullness of
detail and generality, the work of the annual global catalog will become
completely unrealizable; the central office will be literally overwhelmed and
the iSA will no longer be able to meet the expenses. . . . So it will be abso-
lutely necessary to renounce this publication. Moreover, and to use what
seems to me an entirely natural analogy, can one imagine the international
Meteorological Association publishing an annual catalog of rainfall on the
surface of the globe?”
58
Montessus concluded that seismicity, like rainfall,
was a phenomenon for which annual variations were meaningful only at
the regional scale. By 1909 Montessus seemed resigned to the failure of his
universal seismic description.
Standardizing Disaster
internationalization requires agreement on standards of measurement, and
establishing these was one of the broad achievements of nineteenth-century
science. Standardizing the measurement of disaster, however, was nothing
like standardizing mass, length, or electrical resistance. Unlike the wind-
speed scale used to assess hurricanes, seismic intensity scales involve many
parameters of many kinds. When introducing the Rossi-Forel scale in 1883,
the Swiss Commission expressed the hope that it had “thereby created an
international intensity scale.”
59
in a literal sense, this was true: the scale
was published in german, French, and italian and immediately put to use
in Switzerland and italy. But were these really the same scale? in places,
the italian one hewed closer to De Rossi's original criteria than to Forel's
French amalgam of the two.
60
there were significant differences among all
three in the criteria of human response. Degree 1 required that the shock be
“determined by a seismologist” in italian, but “determined by a practiced
[
exercé, geubte
] observer” in French and german. Degree 2 specified that the
shock be felt by “few people at rest” in French, but there was no comparable
criterion in italian. Degree 3 required that the shock be reported in news-
papers and perceived “by people who are not concerned with seismology”
