Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
f o u r
The Tongues of Seismology:
Switzerland, 1855-1912
The public is learning to observe earthquakes.
1
Between 1878 and 1880, Switzerland, Italy, and Japan initiated the first na-
tional earthquake commissions, but only the Swiss made ordinary citizens
a vital part of this undertaking. The nation was divided into seven regions,
in each of which one scientist was responsible for soliciting and redacting
observations of ground motion and related phenomena, to be penned by
volunteers on questionnaires or postcards and mailed free of charge. It was
a system that would be imitated around the world, echoed even today in the
uS Geological Survey's website Did You feel It? The immediate aims of the
Swiss observing network were to locate epicenters by mapping the felt in-
tensity of tremors, determine their depth, and distinguish among different
types of earthquake according to felt motion. Implicit was the goal of pro-
viding information on seismic hazards for the grand engineering projects
for which Switzerland became famous in the nineteenth century—from
mines to Alpine trains and tunnels to dams and canals along the rhine and
its subsidiaries.
2
Among the fruits of the Swiss Earthquake Commission's
first two decades of work was the conclusion that tectonic quakes occurred
principally in three “habitual regions of shock”—in the rhine valley near
Saint Gallen, in the corner between the Alps and the Jura near Lake Geneva,
and around the three lakes of the Jura.
3
At the same time, geologists began
to interpret tectonic earthquakes as symptoms of mountain formation. As
Albert Heim, one of the commission's founders, explained to potential ob-
servers: “Most earthquakes are the expressions of the ongoing formation of
mountains beneath our feet.”
4
Still, one might wonder, earthquakes? In Switzerland?
