Legends Of Seismology :: essays research papers

Legends in Our Time Seismologists†¦ Scientists and Mathematicians Beno Gutenberg was the foremost observational seismologist of the twentieth century. He combined exquisite analysis of seismic records with powerful analytical, interpretive, and modeling skills to contribute many important discoveries of the structure of the solid Earth and its atmosphere. Perhaps his best known contribution was the precise location of the core of the Earth and the identification of its elastic properties. Other major contributions include the travel-time curves; the discovery of very long-period seismic waves with large amplitudes that circle the Earth; the identification of differences in crustal structure between continents and oceans, including the discovery of a significantly thin crust in the Pacific; the discovery of a low-velocity layer in the mantle (which he interpreted as the zone of decoupling of horizontal motions of the surficial parts from the deeper parts of the Earth); the creation of the magnitude scale for earthquakes; the relation between magnitu des and energies for earthquakes; the famous universal magnitude-frequency relation for earthquake distributions; the first density distribution for the mantle; the study of the temperature distribution in the Earth; the understanding of microseisms; and the structure of the atmosphere. Source: http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/bgutenberg.html Inge Lemann's primary accomplishments dealt with discoveries about the Earth's core. In 1936, she discovered that the Earth has a small inner core. Then she "saw" the area where earthquake waves did not pass through and reasoned that there must be an outer liquid core and an inner solid core. She was the first president of the European Seismological Commission. Lehmann was Denmark's only seismologist for two decades. And, in 1977, she became the first woman to be awarded the Medal of the Seismological Society of America. Source: http://www.physics.purdue.edu/wip/herstory/lehmann.html Charles Francis Richter started working at the Seismological Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, based at Pasadena, California, in 1927. The following year, he was awarded a doctorate in theoretical physics by the Californian Institute of Technology (Caltech). During the 1930s, Richter was tabulating over 200 earthquakes a year in southern California at Caltech's Seismological Laboratory. He wanted to devise a means of assessing them on an objective, quantitative basis. Measuring the amplitudes of seismic waves recorded on seismographs in southern California, Richter formulated a local magnitude scale, to assess the size of earthquakes occurring in the region.