AN EARTH STORM AT HAND

Hokitika Guardian, 24 August 1928, Page 4

AN EARTH STORM AT HAND

(By Professor R.AFFAELE BENDANDI, Director of the Geo-dynamc Observatory of Faenza, in Italy, and a leading authority on earthquakes). Our earth is passing at the present moment through one of its acutest crisis. It might bo safcl that the surface shivers with the movement of earthquake, and in some zones it leaps up, producing iiicaiulnblc disasters.

Every time these disastrous phenomena take place, sowing death and ruin over large countrysides, men turn to scientists to ask them their cause and origin. How they will be satisfied with the replies which they receive is another question. For to say, as is habitually said, that the earthquake is nothing but the result of geological displacements and replacements, or to affirm that they arc determined by some loss of equilibrium due to the great' tension that the solid envelope of the world suffers, is indeed to say* but little. It is a fact which is now clearly demonstrated that in the life of the universe there are periods of destruction, there are epochs in which earthquakes come more often and more intensely than in other calmer times.

If these shocks are caused by the mere motions of geological strata why then should these occur specially in certain epochs and not in others? Such ail explanation is not sufficient, for if earthquakes were the result of nothing but subterranean dislocations and subsidences as many suppose them to lie, then such phenomena could oidv occui* irregularly, as it cannot Le admitted logically that there is any law regulating ami determining them. This supposition - is so absurd that no scientist could even think of H. In the book of Nature there is a.

great truth which its readers, however, do not seem able or willing (•> grasp, ancl this is that in Nature th > accident does not exist. Everything which the unversed attribute to ace - dent is rather the result of linknow i forces. The terrible cataclysms of tlm earth arc hut manifestations indispensable to the. life of the plane' . Tlie unexpected shaking of tlie earth s crust does not .' represent, tberelore. the letting 'loose of blind forces, i'> flagrant opposition to the laws of equilibrium which govern tlie worle. They stand for what might be called the calculated exterior reproductions of the unchanging and granite-like laws of Nature.

This definite conclusion has been reached by the writer after 20 years rigorous research into the matter in question. Investigations which I lmve carried out at tlio observatory m ■Faenza with apparatus conceived and constructed by me especially for th” work have led me to an extraordinary discovery which is nothing less than that the force of gravity is subject tcrapid variations. This is a phenomenon which up to now has been entirely unsuspected. The discovery, which T Have rigorously tested, opines now to overturn not a few modern physical theories, while at the same time it maintains in their lofty position the Laws of Newton, linking them with the more recent deductions of Einstein. These conclusions are without doubt extremely daring, hut i reached Ilium only after 21) years’ systematic observation carried on in an underground post, safeguarded from all disturbance of caloric origin. In this underground study, if I may call it so. I. came to see at long last that the earthy crust upon which we live b subject to continual oscillations, due to movements of compression, to stretchings over vast, tracts.

All tills is due to the variation of gravity—that is to say, of that force which determines the weight of lid-

The movement of which 1 speak war. not easily recognisable in positions situated on the ground level, where it was as if masked by a thousand other movements, such as the flow of th<> tides, thermo-barometric action, and so on; hilt in my underground post it soon revealed itself in full evidence. This fact having been ascertained by me beyond tlio realm of doubt my task was now to seek the emir.? of it origin and production. Briefly, this was that, earthquakes, wherever they occur, spring from one uniform source.

Tt- is not possible to look upon any given earthquake as the result of some local earth movements in any particular zone, ft is not to be denied, of course, that sometimes subterranean collapses, fractures, and the slipping of strata accompany these phenomena, but tlie.v are not the cause of it, merely the result. Therefore, certain earthquake districts arc not dangerous in themselves, but become so only when the forces which produce seismic phenomena intervene in such districts. The primary cause has a purely cos-

mic origin, and it is the same as that n'hich produces the orogenetic or mountain-creating wrinkles of the crust of the earth, that wrinkling which through the centuries moulds out mountains through earthquakes and eruptions, dislocations and fractures of the earth, and other similar phenomena of which those which have frightened us up to date are hut simple episodes. Therefore, starting from these new principles, I was able to predict with accuracy the recent earthquakes which took place in various zzones of the world—those in Alaska, in the Alps in March, in Bulgaria, in Greece, and in the Andes.

Leaving the question of earthquakes which have already occurred, I may i now state that violent shocks are about to take place in Palestine, in the Greek Archipelago, and lighter ones in the Crimea and Italy. , This great earth-storm or crisis, heralded by light tremors, is near at hand. * Between now and the 13th there will be counter shocks on a- considerable scale and of powerful character in Central America and upon the north-eastern rim of the Continent of Asia. All these shocks are hut the prelude to. a still greater and wider re-awakening of the subterranean forces which has been under way for some time and will reach its climax next autumn with violent manifestations in the South of Europe.