UK Children Cause Earthquake in Giant Jump

[Harshal Chhaya <>]

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In August, Nelson posted a message about school children all across 
the UK asked to jump for a minute. It was to measure the impact on 
machines used to monitor earthquakes.

His email is here: http://www.mumbai-central.com/nukkad/aug2001/msg00182.html


Today (Sep 7), they jumped. And did cause a measurable tremor. 

A highly participatory science experiment. Cool!



Here is the Reuters' story:
 
UK Children Cause Earthquake in Giant Jump 

Around one million British school children succeeded in causing an 
earthquake on Friday, jumping up and down simultaneously in the world's 
largest scientific experiment.

Thousands of schools around Britain were asked to send children out into 
the playgrounds at 11 a.m. (6:00 a.m. EDT) to jump up and down for a 
minute in the hope of creating a measurable quake.

Organizers of the Giant Jump event, held to mark the launch of the 
government's Science Year, said it had been a success.

"We're almost sure we had a million people out there jumping for us. 
We got some kind of result at every single seismometer around the 
country," Nigel Pain, director of Science Year, told Reuters.

"We generated something like a hundredth of a serious earthquake -- that's 
not an enormous amount of energy but it's significant."

The exact number of people taking part would have to be verified, but 
he said it was an unofficial world record.

Early estimates suggested 75,000 tons of energy had been released during 
the minute of jumping.

"Because it's dissipated across the whole country it didn't do very 
much damage. But drop that in one spot and it would have caused quite 
a big hole in the ground," he added.

Over the next two weeks the results from around the country will be 
analyzed to see if the event registered on the Richter scale.

Scientists said a million children with an average weight of 110 pounds 
jumping 20 times in a minute would release two billion joules of energy 
and trigger the equivalent of an earthquake measuring three on the 
Richter scale.

The event has also attracted serious attention from scientists including 
the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), which maintains Britain's 
nuclear warheads.

Pain said: "The jump will tell us how long vibration lasts in the 
upper Earth crust, whether it's over instantaneously, or if it continues 
for seconds or even minutes.

"The AWE will be working on it for several weeks to come."

Fortunately the world didn't split in two as one of the children surveyed 
before the event believed would happen, nor did the Earth leave the Sun's 
orbit as feared by another.

A third came up with a more likely, if less exciting scenario.

"There will be lots of hospital visits from people with sprained ankles." 




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