Making the earth move

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LONDON (Reuters) - Around one million school children have succeeded in causing an earthquake, 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. to jump up and down for a minute in the hope of creating a measurable quake.

Organisers 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 tonnes 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 analysed to see if the event registered on the Richter scale.

Scientists said a million children with an average weight of 50 kg (110 lb) 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.

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."

-- Anonymous, September 07, 2001

Answers

Why on earth do they want to create an earthquake? Live through a few real ones, and they won't be in any hurry for artificial ones.

Anyhow there was a U2 concert in Europe(Germany? Holland?) in the 80s that was so loud, it registered on teh seismic scale. A far more entertaining experiment, imo. ;-)

-- Anonymous, September 07, 2001


I'm still waiting for China to try something similar. The entire nation jumping off a chair at the same time would cause the Earth to change its axis...or something like that

-- Anonymous, September 07, 2001

That's like really far out and heavy Bobby.

-- Anonymous, September 07, 2001

A bit like an oil tanker in the middle of the Pacific... ;-)

-- Anonymous, September 07, 2001

your on form today Bobby.

-- Anonymous, September 07, 2001


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