Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the continents and oceans were permanently fixed. earthquakes took on
new significance as evidence that the movement of the continental plates
was still in progress. In principle, macroseismic observations should also
have acquired new value as clues to the detailed distribution of faults and
thus the contours of the plates.
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on the global scale of the new plate tec-
tonics, however, details of local seismicity tended to fade from scientists'
attention. They took little interest in intraplate earthquakes, which remain
poorly understood—though potentially destructive. At the same time, the
globalization of news in the early twentieth century made reports of local
tremors ever less likely to find their way into print. Working knowledge of
the geography of seismic hazard was fast disappearing.
Local Earthquakes and Global Tectonics
Such knowledge had been built, inch by inch and tremor by tremor, by
countless unrecognized observers. But the method behind it was associated
above all with one man, the Austrian geologist eduard Suess.
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A veteran
of the 1848 revolutions, Suess firmly believed that scientists had a duty
to serve society. Geologists were responsible for keeping their communi-
ties safe and healthy from the ground up. He encapsulated his sense of the
interdependence of environmental and social conditions in the subtitle of
his 1867 study,
The Ground of the City of Vienna: According to Its Manner of
Formation, Composition, and Its Relationship to Civic Life.
Suess turned projects
of urban improvement into opportunities for geological research, and his
conclusions bore directly on the lives of the city's residents. He was the
first to discover, for instance, that a portion of the drinking-water supply in
several neighborhoods came from the drainage of cemeteries.
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Likewise,
Suess's engagement with the regulation of the Danube stemmed from his
experience of the flood of 1862, when he saw the poorest residents of his
neighborhood fleeing their ground-floor apartments and witnessed the
drowning of an entire herd of oxen.
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As he argued in
The Ground of the City
of Vienna
, engineering a healthy city was a municipal responsibility, not a
private one. even today, Suess's achievements are recalled in references to
Vienna's “Sueß-Wasser” (freshwater). In 1873 Suess was elected as a liberal
representative to the Austrian parliament.
Three days into that new year, just before seven in the evening, Suess was
seated at his writing desk in Vienna when he felt a sudden jerk. Two hundred
and eighty-three years earlier, an earthquake had famously damaged Saint
Stephen's cathedral, in the center of Vienna. As Suess would soon learn, the
heaviest damages in both cases occurred in precisely the same place. It could
