Earthly Power

Japanese seismologists were still mulling over the subsea earthquake which shook and wave-smashed their islands a fortnight ago. At Tokyo's Earthquake Research Institute, Dr. Takahiro Hagiwara, one of Japan's leading seismologists, could not yet put his finger on the exact "epicenter," the place where the earth's crust had suddenly yielded, loosing the earthquake's force. He thought it lay somewhere off the east coast of Shikoku Island, where the sea is 10,000 feet deep. Careful soundings might eventually show that the sea bottom had moved a few yards. This would have been enough to stir up monstrous waves.

The earthquake was the latest episode in the earth crust movement which ages ago pushed up the mountainous ridge of Japan. The active earthquake zone hugs the eastern shores of the islands from southernmost Kyushu to Hokkaido in the north. The part near the latest quake shows major activity every century or so: in 1707 and 1854.

^ Though Dr. Hagiwara could not yet give a complete description of his earthquake, he was rather proud of it. Its force, he said, equaled 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ergs, a hundred thousand times as strong as an atomic bomb.

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