Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Conclusion
By 1935, Wood's science of seismic disaster resembled an aging dam, barely
able to contain the multiple currents that flowed into it. The publication
of the Richter scale struck it like an earthquake, cracking its walls. Its waters
rapidly diverged. Seismology's internationalist current was channeled into
the high-tech observatory science of the International Seismological Sum-
mary. Its concern with the human impact of disaster was funneled into the
nationalist enterprise of Cold War disaster studies. Its methods of measur-
ing sensible earthquakes fed into the risk-management strategies of earth-
quake engineering. These new enterprises were generally managerial and
technocratic, sharing little of seismology's earlier concern with environmen-
tal adaptation and public communication. Twentieth-century seismology
replaced earthquakes with “microseisms,” felt reports with seismographic
traces, “violence” with so many meters-per-second-squared. The earthquake
as scientific object became something unrecognizable to its victims.
Future research might compare the fates of other nineteenth-century sci-
ences of disaster. Famines, droughts, and epidemics also became objects of
scientific investigation in the late eighteenth century in frameworks that en-
compassed natural and social factors. In these early scientific accounts, vic-
tims would have seen their own experiences clearly reflected. Then, from the
1870s, scientific explanations of climate-related catastrophes grew increas-
ingly reductive, focused on sunspot cycles and global atmospheric oscilla-
tions. Simultaneously, the hunt for microbes replaced the early nineteenth
century's more multifaceted, socio-environmental explanations of disease.
Human experiences of disaster no longer counted as scientific evidence.
In this sense, the histories of climatology, epidemiology, and seismology
since the 1870s all involve the construction of incommensurability between
