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Seismology

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rapid advances in the study of earthquakes in the last century and what those have revealed about the structure of our planet.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the study of earthquakes. A massive earthquake in 1755 devastated Lisbon, and this disaster helped inspire a new science of seismology which intensified after San Francisco in 1906 and advanced even further with the need to monitor nuclear tests around the world from 1945 onwards. While we now know so much more about what lies beneath the surface of the Earth, and how rocks move and crack, it remains impossible to predict when earthquakes will happen. Thanks to seismology, though, we have a clearer idea of where earthquakes will happen and how to make some of them less hazardous to lives and homes.

With

Rebecca Bell
Senior lecturer in Geology and Geophysics at Imperial College London

Zoe Mildon
Lecturer in Earth Sciences and Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Plymouth

And

James Hammond
Reader in Geophysics at Birkbeck, University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Available now

50 minutes

Last on

Thu 10 Mar 2022 21:30

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

CONTRIBUTORS








READING LIST

Deborah R. Coen, The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

C.M.R. Fowler, The Solid Earth: An Introduction to Global Geophysics (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Susan Hough, The Great Quake Debate: The Crusader, the Skeptic, and the Rise of Modern Seismology (University of Washington Press, 2020)

William H.K. Lee and others (eds.), International Handbook of Earthquake & Engineering Seismology (Academic Press, 2002), especially the chapter ‘History of Seismology’ by D. C. Agnew

Stephen Marshak, Earth: Portrait of a Planet (W. W. Norton & Company, 2018)


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Broadcasts

  • Thu 10 Mar 2022 09:00
  • Thu 10 Mar 2022 21:30

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