Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
in 1901 the eminent göttingen geophysicist emil Wiechert—“a most
complicated scientific imperialist”
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—appeared at the founding meeting of
the iSA to discuss “Seismological Observations in the german Colonies.”
“For a long, long time,” he reminded his putatively international audience,
“we germans have sat in our narrow Fatherland and regarded what lay out-
side its borders as a foreign world. today that has changed; we feel ourselves
to be inhabitants of the earth and send out our ideas and plans with the
ships that sail the world. . . . Not only politically and economically, but also
scientifically we will need to look for points of leverage in our colonies.”
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Wiechert was right: imperialism motivated and structured international-
ism in seismology. Most seismic observatories founded beyond continental
europe and North America in this period—aside from the iSA's stations
in iceland and Lebanon—were colonial outposts. the germans, for in-
stance, sponsored observatories in Jiaozhou, China; Apia, Samoa; and Dar
es Salaam, tanzania.
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Of these, only the Samoa observatory survived until
World War two (under New Zealand's sponsorship), and only as the ill-
equipped and poorly staffed shell of the former institution.
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Subsequently,
plans for a dense and truly global network of seismometers have failed in
the face of objections that such surveillance would compromise national se-
curity.
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As helen tilley has recently argued of the human and environmen-
tal sciences in British colonial Africa, nineteenth-century seismology had a
surprising potential to generate friction with the very project of empire. the
give-and-take between observatory and field studies tended to alert scien-
tists to the value of vernacular knowledge and the complexity and specificity
of human-environmental interactions. When confined to the observatory,
though, seismology became all too easy to assimilate to the simplifications
of an imperialist worldview.
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