Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Attempting to shake some sense into the public and fellow scientists,
the British macroseismologists of the nuclear era seized on the example of
Comrie. the Scottish village served, first, as evidence that earthquakes were
not so exotic after all. Muir-wood and a colleague opened a 1983 article in
the popular magazine
New Scientist
with an account of a rural community
terrorized by a shock that had thrown down paintings and cracked walls.
“Italy, Greece, some Pacific state of South America?” they asked their read-
ers. “No, just Britain in the 19th century.”
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Comrie recalled a time when, as
the authors put it, “news that Britain had earthquakes was no news.” In the
nineteenth century, they argued, the public was well informed about past
shocks, thanks to the local press and to oral tradition. then the interna-
tional media intervened: “Journalists had successfully convinced even rural
communities that real history poured out of the radio and the television.
the folk memory faded into collective amnesia.” Finally, the new macro-
seismologists marshaled the case of Comrie against mainstream seismolo-
gists, who could not imagine the value of human earthquake observers in
late twentieth-century Britain. Comrie demonstrated that noninstrumental
research could generate fundamental scientific knowledge. As Musson ar-
gued in a 1993 article on Comrie's “place in the history of seismology,” the
Scottish village “indicates the usefulness of earthquake swarms as a testing
ground for seismological investigation.”
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Indeed, Comrie's tremors had prompted the development of one of the
earliest scales of seismic intensity as well as the most sophisticated seis-
mometer of the mid-nineteenth century; they had also inspired some of
Davison's seminal contributions to the methods of macroseismic survey.
the organization of Comrie's residents into a quake-observing network was
a successful geophysical experiment; less obvious is its status as a human ex-
periment. Comrie served as a laboratory for the study of the social relations
of British science: for the apportioning of authority between local common
sense and metropolitan expertise. For the British press, however, Comrie
lives on principally as a punch line. In March of 2008 the
Times
reported
that the Earthquake House had failed to record the strongest earthquake to
hit Britain in twenty years, “because it had run out of paper.”
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