Word: seismologists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Small Aftershocks. "The chances are small, but not zero," says Seismologist Lynn Sykes of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory. He and other scientists think that a less dangerous method of earthquake control might be to pump liquid into a fault region. Such fluids would relieve stresses by acting, in part, as underground lubricants. Yet this method also poses dangers. In the Denver area, for example, recent shocks were apparently triggered by the disposal of chemical wastes in deep underground wells...
Naturally, the vast majority of Californians are treating the doomsday talk as a huge, macabre joke, but the fears of the gloomy visionaries are not entirely without justification. Seismologists say that California has been long overdue for a major earthquake, although a fissure that would split the state in two along the length of the 600-mile San Andreas fault is in their opinion inconceivable. Nor, they add, can anyone predict the time, place or magnitude of the quake with absolute certitude. In fact, one of the quake dates predicted by soothsayers, April 4, passed last week without a tremor...
Although scientists are powerless to prevent earthquakes, they have high hopes that they can some day forecast them with reasonable accuracy. That day may not be far off. By carefully measuring movements along the San Andreas and nearby smaller faults, Seismologist Renner Hofmann says, he has successfully predicted recent California earthquakes. To prove that he is not merely displaying scientific hindsight, Hofmann has issued a new U.S. quake-cast. Within the next 18 months, he predicts, earthquakes of at least moderate intensity will rock areas near Santa Cruz and south of Bakersfield...
Died. Hugo Benioff, 68, foremost U.S. seismologist who turned the art of predicting earthquakes into a science; of a heart attack; in Mendocino, Calif. After charting geological faults along the U.S. West Coast, Benioff warned in 1949 that the forces that caused the 1906 San Francisco earthquake were building toward further upheavals, a prediction borne out by the California earthquakes of 1950 and 1952. His variable-reluctance seismograph, which records tiny changes in a magnetic field, after 30 years is still standard around the world...
Divide by 10. That theory was proposed in 1960 by University of Athens Seismologist Anghelos Galanopoulos, who believes that Plato misread by a factor of 10 the dimensions of Atlantis and the date of its destruction given in an Egyptian manuscript. Dividing by 10, Galanopoulos came up with an area roughly encompassing Thera and Crete; similarly reducing Platos date to 900 years before Solon, he moved the destruction of Atlantis forward to about 1490 B. C. At about that time, a well-documented volcanic eruption plunged large portions of Thera into the sea, rained lethal vapors and debris on Crete...