Earthquakes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions

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On November 1, 1755--All Saints' Day--a massive earthquake struck Europe's Iberian Peninsula and destroyed the city of Lisbon. Churches collapsed upon thousands of worshippers celebrating the holy day. Earthquakes in Human History tells the story of that calamity and other epic earthquakes. The authors, Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders, recapture the power of their previous book, Volcanoes in Human History. They vividly explain the geological processes responsible for earthquakes, and they describe how these events have had long-lasting aftereffects on human societies and cultures. Their accounts are enlivened with quotations from contemporary literature and from later reports.

In the chaos following the Lisbon quake, government and church leaders vied for control. The Marquês de Pombal rose to power and became a virtual dictator. As a result, the Roman Catholic Jesuit Order lost much of its influence in Portugal. Voltaire wrote his satirical work Candide to refute the philosophy of "optimism," the belief that God had created a perfect world. And the 1755 earthquake sparked the search for a scientific understanding of natural disasters.

Ranging from an examination of temblors mentioned in the Bible, to a richly detailed account of the 1906 catastrophe in San Francisco, to Japan's Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, to the Peruvian earthquake in 1970 (the Western Hemisphere's greatest natural disaster), this book is an unequaled testament to a natural phenomenon that can be not only terrifying but also threatening to humankind's fragile existence, always at risk because of destructive powers beyond our control.

Customer Reviews ::

Lots and lots, some speculative, about volcanoes - Harry Eagar - Maui
"Volcanoes in History" offers what its authors call a "vibrating string" metaphor for the interaction of volcanoes and people.
When there's a big, explosive eruption -- say, at Mount St. Helens -- the immediate effects are dramatic but then everything slows down.
The blast lasts just hours; the cooling of the climate, famines and epidemics last years; the recovery of the landscape takes at least decades; and the cultural effects can continue working their process for centuries.
It is not unlike the damping of the amplitude and lengthening of the frequency that happens after a taut string is twanged.
Not all the effects have to be bad. Scientists now think that most, perhaps all the water on the planet was produced through volcanoes.
Besides killing people, volcanism has destroyed empires (maybe), and, more trivially, kept Mary Shelley indoors, where in her idle moments she wrote "Frankenstein."
Zeilinga de Boer teaches a course about the interaction of volcanoes and humans at Princeton that he says "demonstrates to liberal arts students that the sciences are not 'bloodless'."
In this effort, he quotes a lot of poetry about volcanoes by Tennyson and otherwise attempts to show that volcanoes can be interesting, if not for themselves, then for the exalted thoughts they inspire.
This approach suggests that the Princeton undergrad is a dull fellow. Volanoes are complicated enough to be interesting for their own sakes.
There is a lot we still don't know about them. What we have learned -- most of it only recently -- is more interesting than the musings of an elderly Englishman who never saw a live volcano in his life.
For example, it was only in 1985 that the geologist Harold Stearns persuaded his colleagues that Haleakala crater on Maui -- the world's biggest volcanic crater (about the size of Manhattan Island) -- is an artifact of erosion, not eruption.
That seems firmly nailed down now. Some of the authors' other ruminations are more doubtful, as they stride through history in seven-league boots.
No one doubts any more that Thera (Santorini) blew up explosively about 3,500 years ago, causing much trouble in the eastern Mediterranean. But whether we can link Thera's blast to the origin of Greek literacy is a stretch.
And Zeilinga de Boer and Sanders' attempt to cross-date Thera and the Israelite exile in Egypt will not persuade Biblical scholars, many of whom no longer believe there ever were any Israelites in pharaonic Egypt , because not a single artifact there can be associated with them until many centuries later.
Nevertheless, the concept of looking at the big social picture is novel and entertaining. For people who worry about global warming, the ability of volcanoes to cool the Earth ought to be a comfort.
For people who live on a volcano -- even such placid ones as in Hawaii -- "Volcanoes in Human History" combines well with Alwyn Scarth's 1999 book "Vulcan's Fury," which takes what might be called a civil defense approach to volcanism.
Both use the casebook approach, with similar but not identical lists of famous eruptions. Both are full of information that might be useful to know at some unpredictable point in the future.
For example, if you decide not to evacuate from a volcano that is erupting and throwing big rocks into the air, it is helpful not to have to relearn the lesson that Icelanders picked up while trying to save their houses during the extended eruption at Vestmannaeyjar in 1973: "Red-hot lava bombs continually rained down upon Vestmannaeyjar, plunging through the roofs of buildings and keeping firefighters busy. As in wartime, people out of doors kept an eye peeled for incoming missiles. They learned not to run from them, but to simply watch until they were sure of their trajectory, then step aside if necessary."
Although most of "Volcanoes in History" is devoted to violent eruptions, which almost never occur in Hawaii, there is a long chapter on Hawaiian volcanoes, used to illustrate the forces that cause volcanoes to wax and wane.
And, you never know, every once in a while even Hawaiian volcanoes act up.
The last serious killer eruption was from Kilauea in 1868, but at intervals of some hundreds of thousands of years, Hawaiian volcanoes tend to fall apart, generating tsunami of unbelievable proportions -- one swept the soil off of Lanai up to a height of 900 feet above present sea level.

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