Irish pupils pick up quake on class seismometers

SCHOOLCHILDREN were among the first in Ireland to trace the path and magnitude of the Japanese earthquake — in their own classrooms.

Pupils of 50 schools around the country which are part of the international Seismology in Schools project arrived in class yesterday morning to discover dramatic readings on their seismometers.

Our picture from Coláiste Chríost Rí in Cork shows the moment shockwaves from the earthquake passed beneath the city while the students slept at two minutes to six in the morning.

“It only took 12 minutes for the energy generated by the earthquake to arrive in Ireland under the ground,” explained Tom Blake, director of the Irish National Seismic Network (INSN) and project manager of Seismology in Schools.

“The magnitude registered the same here as in did at the epicentre near Japan — it’s our distance from the epicentre that spares us from the full force of the quake.”

The classroom seismometers are designed to do the same job as the three major INSN stations around the country.

“We are accurate to milliseconds while the children’s are accurate to seconds but they are serious pieces of equipment and once something like this happens, an immediate lesson starts in geography, physics and maths. It’s a wonderful project.”

It’s not a purely academic exercise either, as Ireland has plenty of reason to fear earthquakes. The last earthquake-related tsunami to hit the country was in 1755 when parts of Cork were inundated, but quakes in the Atlantic Ocean in 1941 and 1975 had the potential to cause devastation here.

“They measured 8.2 and 7.3 on the Richter scale and all you need for a tsunami is a quake of 6.5 but they were deep in the earth so they didn’t have that effect. But if were to get a quake of similar magnitude closer to the surface, you would get a tsunami here.”

While yesterday’s quake is the biggest recorded since the schools project got under way, it isn’t the first seismic activity recorded in classrooms.

In January and May last year, two small quakes each measuring 2.6 were recorded in Dublin and Clare.