Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
human observations could contribute to new scientific insights, even in the
seismographic age: “Besides its practical bearing, the results of such correla-
tions have much scientific value, no less than the purely instrumental stud-
ies.”
114
Wood would argue this point with growing passion for the rest of his
career: that the study of earthquakes as a geophysical problem must not be
divorced from the study of earthquakes as an environmental hazard.
Again on the model of nineteenth-century seismology, Wood concluded
that such a holistic investigation would depend on “the co-operation of
large numbers of observers,” for “even the keenest observer cannot compass
all that is taking place about him.” the greater the number of observers re-
porting on an earthquake, the “more complete its description.” It remained
only for Wood to furnish guidelines to potential witnesses—a full thirty
pages of instructions. thirteen years later, he would regret overburdening
his readers.
115
Indeed, his guidelines were discursive, anecdotal, speculative,
and open-ended. Like earlier european counterparts, they addressed the ob-
server as both a register of geophysical effects and a naturalist in her own
right. Wood encouraged observers to record their “Sensations and emo-
tions.” these fell into two classes. In the first were those that were “part
objective” and “part subjective,” “undoubtedly effects of [the earthquake's]
motion, subjectively modified.” these included “faintness, dizziness, nau-
sea, fear in varying degrees, and all analogous feelings.” the second class
included indirect results of the shaking and effects that preceded the earth-
quake by hours or even days—potential predictors, in other words. these
included “nervous irritability, restlessness among brutes and birds, ill-
defined dread, a sense of oppression, and the like,” which possibly had
“an objective basis in the physical conditions which prevail just before the
shock.” Since “effects of this sort are not susceptible of classification, observ-
ers should report them by giving brief descriptions.” this held all the more
for “Unclassified Phenomena,” such as the appearance of lights or flames.
Wood speculated that these might be of “still greater scientific importance,
because uncommon and sporadic, and hence rarely subjected to observa-
tion, criticism, and interpretation,” and he asked that “a full description”
be given.
116
In this way, Wood preserved seismology's nineteenth-century
character as a phenomenological, epistemically open field, dependent on
and well suited to nonexpert contributions.
On the Margins
In 1913 Wood left his dead-end lectureship at Berkeley to become the first
seismologist at the newly founded Hawaiian Volcano Observatory on the
