Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
distinguished “true” from “apparent” intensity precisely in order to reveal
where damage had exceeded expectations. By the 1960s, however, it was
widely assumed that an earthquake was fully described by its epicenter and
Richter magnitude. Byerly was warning that such a description constituted
willful ignorance. Macroseismology, the study of an earthquake's percepti-
ble effects, was nothing short of an ethical obligation: to “preserve the his-
tory, the record of what happened.”
