Transcript:
00:00:07 Cabot Institute
Welcome to Cabot conversations produced by the Cabot Institute for the Environment at the University of Bristol.
00:00:13 Cabot Institute
We are a diverse community of 600 experts united by a common cause protecting our environment and identifying ways of living better with our changing planet.
00:00:23 Cabot Institute
This podcast series brings together our experts and collaborators to discuss complex environmental challenges and solutions to climate change.
00:00:32 Cabot Institute
In this episode, Doctor Daniel Haynes and Doctor Max Verner discuss earthquakes and the environment. You can find out more about the Cabot Institute for the environment at bristol.ac.uk/cabot.
00:00:51 Dr Max Werner
Hi everyone, I’m Max Warner. I’m an associate professor of geophysics and natural hazards here at the University of Bristol and a member of the Cabinet Institute for the Envoy.
00:01:01 Dr Max Werner
Dammit.
00:01:02 Dr Daniel Haines
Hi, I’m Daniel Haines. I’m senior lecturer in environmental history in the School of Humanities here at Bristol and a member of the Cabinet Institute for the Environment as well.
00:01:13 Dr Max Werner
So Dan, I was just reflecting a little bit on on the first time we met, which I think is about seven or eight years ago.
00:01:21 Dr Max Werner
And I think we met at a coffee shop, one of the first things that happened when I came to to Bristol was.
00:01:30 Dr Max Werner
I found the Cabot Institute for the for the Environment and, I heard from someone that there was a a guy over in history who’s interested in earthquakes.
00:01:43 Dr Max Werner
And that turned out to be you. And so we were set up on a little academic date and over coffee, I think we talked about earthquakes in South Asia. So I guess I I just wanted to ask you, you know what, what was what drew you to earthquakes as a historian, how did you?
00:02:04 Dr Max Werner
You know, cross that that boundary.
00:02:07 Dr Daniel Haines
Well, I was.
00:02:10 Dr Daniel Haines
Searching for things to teach in my first year as a lecturer at Bristol and a friend of mine was doing her PhD on flooding in Pakistan and I had a background in environmental history in South Asia and I thought her PhD sounded way cooler than what I was working on on at the time. So when I got here, I decided to teach a course on.
00:02:30 Dr Daniel Haines
Environmental natural disaster history in South Asia and I found out that there had been this earthquake in 1897 which, uh, which you know well, the Shillong earthquake which made the average ground level in the Shillong Plateau lift up by a metre.
00:02:48 Dr Daniel Haines
And I’d never heard of this. I’ve been working on South Asian history.
00:02:51 Dr Daniel Haines
For a good.
00:02:52 Dr Daniel Haines
Uh, seven or eight or nine years by that point, and I thought, how can I not know about this in on this earthquake? So I started looking into the topic and turned out there were a bunch of other enormous earthquakes that I’d not heard of or barely heard of. And it really made me think.
00:03:08 Dr Daniel Haines
What impact did all these massive disasters have on people who lived there at the time, and why are they kind of missing from the mainstream narratives of?
00:03:16 Dr Daniel Haines
What was going on in India in the early?
00:03:18 Dr Daniel Haines
20th.
00:03:18 Dr Daniel Haines
Century and then my head of department at the time, who was a cover institute affiliate, an extremely enthusiastic about things came to me and said, Dan, I met this new scholar in the ad sciences department who does earthquakes. You should go and have.
00:03:33 Dr Daniel Haines
Coffee.
00:03:34 Dr Daniel Haines
And so we did.
00:03:36 Dr Daniel Haines
And then.
00:03:38 Dr Daniel Haines
That was the start of a beautiful friendship, and you also introduced me to various other people in Earth sciences. So now I know lots of.
00:03:46 Dr Max Werner
Yeah, that that was indeed the the start and and of course we’ll we’ll talk a little bit about our adventures together since then.
00:03:55 Dr Max Werner
But uh, I guess what first drew me to, you know, to, to, I guess you and and history uh was really, you know, trying to place I mean some you know I I I study earthquakes minutely as a scientist I think about the physics I calculate quantities I measure things.
00:04:16 Dr Max Werner
I, you know, study them in the field in the lab sometimes. You know, I look at them empirically.
00:04:24 Dr Max Werner
We, uh, and yet somehow you know the the.
00:04:27 Dr Max Werner
Prospect of of.
00:04:30 Dr Max Werner
Looking at earthquakes through another person’s eyes and and in particular you know another academics eyes or or or someone who also thinks about them in a particular way just sounded really intriguing to me because it’s, you know, it just sort of shines a new light and provides a new perspective on on this thing that I I’ve been studying for.
00:04:50 Dr Max Werner
No now.
00:04:51 Dr Max Werner
Decades.
00:04:53 Dr Max Werner
And in particular, I guess you know the sort of the the intersection between the science and sort of, you know, say the spatial footprint or, you know, how things move during an earthquake and what of course the effects are and also how that shapes, you know.
00:05:12 Dr Max Werner
History I I think it’s just, you know, in a way it’s so much bigger than than earthquakes themselves. So it’s just such a rich, you know, way to to sort of rediscover earthquakes. So I I guess that was sort of.
00:05:25 Dr Max Werner
The the first sort of you know path in which I I became interested in in, in the disciplinary work. But of course out of that conversation sort of spawned a project.
00:05:42 Dr Max Werner
we had some some initial ideas for what we wanted to do.
00:05:50 Dr Max Werner
What was your interest? I guess in that?
00:05:54 Dr Max Werner
In that first project.
00:05:56 Dr Daniel Haines
There were various interests. I mean, one Bhutan sounded lovely and I really wanted to go there and they sounded like a a great way to explore another part of South Asia and get into Himalayan research, which have previously been looking at the the western side of South Asia and Pakistan and NW India.
00:06:13 Dr Daniel Haines
And and secondly, I really wanted the chance to work collaboratively with scientists because I was a science geek when I was a kid. I always loved science, but I eventually went down the humanities, really professionally, and this seemed like a great opportunity to.
00:06:30 Dr Daniel Haines
Sort of see what life might have been like if I was better at maths. And then thirdly, the research problem that we went to the brace project with just being really fascinating, you know, how can we use these historical records, these amazing religious texts and biographical texts that are dispersed across Bhutan in Zang, in all of these monasteries?
00:06:51 Dr Daniel Haines
Can we recover historical data from them that is useful to scientists in kind of doing real science about earthquake hazard? In other words, the the like the way that earthquakes occur physically in that part of the Himalaya? And is there a real way to connect these otherwise quite esoteric seeming historical sources to?
00:07:12 Dr Daniel Haines
Present day decision making and policy making sort of through the conduit of of physical science.
00:07:18 Dr Max Werner
You know it, it sounds very similar to sort of the the interest that that I had in the in that project. So you know maybe in for the other listeners here the the BRACE project was funded by the global Challenges Research Fund led by Francis Cooper A.
00:07:38 Dr Max Werner
Senior lecture here in in Earth sciences, also a member of the Cabot Institute. And it was, uh, I I relatively short one year project that allowed us to explore some historical documents.
00:07:54 Dr Max Werner
And help us sort of constrain some some data from historical documents in in Bhutan that would be relevant for learning more about earthquakes that have happened in Bhutan in the past and help us constrain models or or probabilities of of future earthquakes in.
00:08:14 Dr Max Werner
In that region.
00:08:16 Dr Max Werner
and we had a number of of different collaborators, of course, from the Royal University of Bhutan, Raju Sakar daughter Drukpa from the Ministry of Geology and Mines, Francis Harris, Ferris Lyons and and a few others, and and of course I completely share the, you know, the excitement of of.
00:08:35 Dr Max Werner
Working in Bhutan, you know a country that has very different sort of indicators of progress. The gross National Happiness Index.
00:08:47 Dr Max Werner
You know, basically taking the replacing what I think most other countries focus on, which tends to be GDP, you know it it.
00:08:56 Dr Max Werner
Was the prospect.
00:08:57 Dr Max Werner
Of working there and visiting and and and then of course collaborating with historians and social scientists and.
00:09:06 Dr Max Werner
You know, placing all of that.
00:09:08 Dr Max Werner
Into.
00:09:09 Dr Max Werner
Scientific context. Uh. Once we had that information was was just uh.
00:09:14 Dr Max Werner
You know filling.
00:09:15 Dr Daniel Haines
Well, what’s the?
00:09:16 Dr Daniel Haines
Thing you remember most clearly from that field work time in guitar.
00:09:21 Dr Max Werner
Ohh I I remember many many things you know. One particular joy was of course the film that you and I made then where we were asked by the Royal Tutorial project to make a film.
00:09:41 Dr Max Werner
About, you know, history and and.
00:09:44 Dr Max Werner
Earthquakes and how you know we we’re basically, yeah, we were filming in traditional Bhutanese outfits in a in an old monastery and a song and, you know, spoke in.
00:10:01 Dr Max Werner
A little bit.
00:10:02 Dr Max Werner
Of a wooden fashion, maybe to to the camera.
00:10:05 Dr Max Werner
About earthquakes and and the role that history has in in bringing new scientific information.
00:10:12 Dr Max Werner
Right. That’s certainly one of the highlights for me. How about you?
00:10:16 Dr Daniel Haines
I think for me it’s got to be apart from the film, which was great. It’s got to be when we were in the Zong on the hillside outside Pinaka in western Bhutan.
00:10:26 Dr Daniel Haines
And we were speaking with the monks there who had an original manuscript copy of the knight, Jay Kemper’s autobiography. So there an autobiography written by a very senior and religious figure in Bhutan from the early 18th century, in which he described experiencing the 1714 earthquake.
00:10:47 Dr Daniel Haines
As a small child and describes it in quite significant detail.
00:10:52 Dr Daniel Haines
And and being there with you and having someone who is able to really understand.
00:10:59 Dr Daniel Haines
What the parameters of the physical science were, you know, what can the source tell us about the science at the same time that I was asking the traditional historians questions.
00:11:08 Dr Daniel Haines
Like.
00:11:08 Dr Daniel Haines
What’s the provenance of this source? Is there a possibility of transcription errors? What was the social and political context to be done at the time and and putting those two things together? I mean being in the conversation at the same time.
00:11:21 Dr Daniel Haines
Was really, really instructive, I thought.
00:11:24 Dr Daniel Haines
And at at the same time the the incredible welcome and friendliness that we got from the monks in the.
00:11:31 Dr Max Werner
Song. Yeah, absolutely. That was. That was a a joy. And I think that joy was really shared by by the monks that we were talking to because they were very enthusiastic about talking to us about earthquakes.
00:11:44 Dr Max Werner
, the ground shaking and, sort of other natural phenomena that would show up in, in historical texts. And of course we would look at them through through different eyes, I think.
00:12:03 Dr Max Werner
Think in in uh, some of their descriptions, these events were symbols for, you know, events of great spiritual importance. And you know, in in, in many ways, earthquakes can be those moments. Of course they they can be disasters.
00:12:23 Dr Max Werner
And and they they can be tragic, but. And, you know, they can also be experienced in in, you know, in a, in a, in a very different way, you know, especially when.
00:12:36 Dr Max Werner
Sort of observed at at safe distance, and of course, as a scientist I saw these descriptions as as data and and that data is hard to come by for earthquakes before or about 100 years ago.
00:12:56 Dr Max Werner
The first seismometers were really only developed in the in the late late 1800s, early 1900s, and so we’ve really only been systematically, if you like. Seismological only measuring earthquakes routinely since the.
00:13:12 Dr Max Werner
Uh start, you know, 19 tens, 1920s or so. Interestingly, the earthquake that you mentioned, the 1897 uh Shillong earthquake was a very significant earthquake, and it was measured by the few seismometers that existed around.
00:13:30 Dr Max Werner
The world.
00:13:31 Dr Max Werner
And.
00:13:32 Dr Max Werner
Those seismic waves and how they travel through the earth and were observed and you know, other sides of the earth led to the discovery of the Earth’s core.
00:13:45 Dr Max Werner
So that was a indeed a hugely important earthquake for providing insights into the interior of the earth, you know, and even more interesting, right, that that a lot of the regional devastation was, you know, somehow excluded from.
00:14:05 Dr Max Werner
From historical text for uh for a while, but coming back to, you know, the historical text and and that visit to that monastery outside Punakha, you know, as a as a scientist to me that those are those are data points, those are constraints.
00:14:20 Dr Max Werner
On earthquakes that have occurred.
00:14:23 Dr Max Werner
Prior to us scientifically measuring them, and so we have eyewitness accounts that tell us something about, you know, where the earthquake happened, how big it might have been based on the on the damage that it did. And if we’re lucky, we can sort of date the earthquake.
00:14:43 Dr Max Werner
In some cases, that’s easier than in.
00:14:45 Dr Max Werner
Yes. And of course we we want to ideally.
00:14:50 Dr Max Werner
Sort of cross.
00:14:50 Dr Max Werner
Correlate eyewitness accounts or or descriptions across multiple texts if we can, because that tells us something about, you know, if somebody observed earthquake damage in southern Bhutan, did somebody?
00:15:06 Dr Max Werner
Also observed around about the same time earthquake damage in in northern Bhutan that tells us something about the size of of the earthquake and one big question that until not too long ago was really whether Bhutan could at all experience these massive earthquakes.
00:15:24 Dr Max Werner
And I think it was reading this text from 1714. Excuse me, this this description of the 1714 earthquake together with some additional geological evidence that revealed that Bhutan was also unfortunately, you know, in a location where massive magnitude 8.
00:15:44 Dr Max Werner
7 1/2 magnitude 8 earthquakes could occur so that you know in in with some historical texts and in addition to some geological information.
00:15:53 Dr Max Werner
Uh, that all of a sudden place Bhutan in a much higher uh, you know, hazard or or threat category than than previously assumed. So you know the this kind of information is absolutely critical for understanding the the earthquake threat in the region.
00:16:12 Dr Daniel Haines
So what is it?
00:16:13 Dr Daniel Haines
About only having instrumental data going back to the early 20th century, that poses a problem. Why do you need these historical texts?
00:16:21 Dr Max Werner
That’s a. That’s a good, good question.
00:16:25 Dr Max Werner
The earthquake cycle, so the sort of recurrence periods of of large earthquakes, you know, mounted 8/8 and 1/2 earthquakes along the Himalaya, which of course is a a plate boundary between the Indian plate and the Eurasian plate, the recurrence.
00:16:45 Dr Max Werner
Terms of these large earthquakes is very long, hundreds of years, potentially thousands of years, so we don’t have instrumental recordings of these largest events along the Himalaya.
00:17:03 Dr Max Werner
The largest ones we have tend to be, you know, for instance, the the 2015 Gorka earthquake in Nepal was.
00:17:11 Dr Max Werner
00:17:11 Dr Max Werner
A magnitude 7.8, but we think the Himalaya is capable of of significantly more. And so we don’t have recordings of those those earthquakes.
00:17:22 Dr Max Werner
And so as a result, it’s it’s very difficult to constrain.
00:17:27 Dr Max Werner
The rates at which earthquakes occur, especially at of of that magnitude, and when we try to project into the future and say, you know, we’re trying to build.
00:17:41 Dr Max Werner
Buildings we’re trying to build hydro power dams, we’re trying to build roads and bridges. You know? How safe do they have to be? We need to have an estimate of the amount of ground shaking that might occur over the next, you know, over the lifetime of this.
00:18:01 Dr Max Werner
This info.
00:18:02 Dr Max Werner
Water. And so to to calculate those rates and and that probability we need to know what the rate of earthquakes will be in the future and how large an earthquake might occur and what you know how how much that earthquake will shake the ground.
00:18:21 Dr Max Werner
And the instrument of record is is just 100 years, which means we we have some information about the, the smaller earthquakes and magnitude, fives and sixes.
00:18:30 Dr Max Werner
But we’re really lacking information about the recurrence periods of the largest events. So the the kinds of events that would have been documented in that in that eyewitness account from 1714. So this is this is really where history provides a very direct.
00:18:50 Dr Max Werner
Source of of data for making these calculations about future earthquake hazard.
00:18:56 Dr Daniel Haines
Yeah, I I I agree. And that’s what excited me about the project.
00:18:59 Dr Daniel Haines
As well, but.
00:19:00 Dr Daniel Haines
We should probably mention that actually we had a lot of other colleagues who work on the social side of things, so social scientists and policy specialists who were looking at ways that we could translate all this research we were doing.
00:19:14 Dr Daniel Haines
Into, well, better policy making, and perhaps in the longer term safer construction and why all of this is important, and it really goes to adaptation and resilience, which is tremendously important in the context of climate change, because we’ve been talking about earthquakes as if they’re.
00:19:34 Dr Daniel Haines
Uh, well, they are literally something that comes down from underground and shakes at the surface, but they interact in really important ways with other environmental processes, other social processes and and just when you were mentioning how safe do dans need to be, it reminded me that there are.
00:19:54 Dr Daniel Haines
As far as I know about, there are three Indian constructed Indian government constructed hydropower dams in Bhutan now and and others underway as of last year.
00:20:05 Dr Daniel Haines
And these account for about 25% of Bhutan’s GDP is gross domestic product product and India actually buys, I think it’s about 75% of Butane’s entire hydropower. So there’s a really important economic relationship between India and Bhutan based on harnessing energy from Bhutanese.
00:20:26 Dr Daniel Haines
Water weights and if those dams are damaged by an earthquake, then not only is that going to have potentially deadly consequences for people who get caught in floods, but it’s also really important economic impact and.
00:20:41 Dr Daniel Haines
Although earthquakes don’t always have the highest mortality rate of major natural hazard events that lead to big natural disasters or or nature based disasters, they do have like massive massive economic impact. So it’s really important that we take them seriously and they really highlighted to me actually.
00:21:01 Dr Daniel Haines
Travelling around Britain with you and Francis and Byron, which we did at some points in our.
00:21:06 Dr Daniel Haines
Field work as.
00:21:06 Dr Daniel Haines
Well, having the three of you giving not just scientific expertise but different types of scientific expertise. So if I’m correct me, if I’ve got this wrong right, but you’re you’re a seismologist, the geophysicist who looks at wave propagation.
00:21:21 Dr Daniel Haines
Francis is a structural geologist who thinks about the formation of rock, and Byron is a geomorphologist who thinks about the way that the uplift of ground from tectonic forces meets basically precipitation and water coming down and actually good shape to the landscape and all three of these things are so.
00:21:41 Dr Daniel Haines
Crucially, internal.
00:21:42 Dr Daniel Haines
Lines.
00:21:43 Dr Max Werner
Well, so you mentioned you know our our other colleagues. So as you, as you correctly pointed out, we had of course also Brian Adams at geomorphologist and and and Francis Harris and and Paris Lyon, Raju Sarkar. And from the social sciences as well as from earthquake engineering.
00:22:03 Dr Max Werner
And the other you.
00:22:05 Dr Max Werner
Know.
00:22:07 Dr Max Werner
Amazing learning opportunity for me during the Grace project was that, uh, we sat together and uh, you know, met with our partners and and our our workshops and and botan and we had, you know, really far ranging conversations around.
00:22:28 Dr Max Werner
How you know this information from science and and you know the historical context for interpreting the the data that had been found. You know how you could actually translate that into building resilience to future Earth.
00:22:44 Dr Max Werner
And you know, that’s an opportunity that I hadn’t really had. Uh, in such a concrete manner before, even though on the size monologist. And I think many people might expect me to be thinking about how you actually make people and.
00:23:04 Dr Max Werner
And and society safe from earthquakes a lot. At the end of the day, I’m a scientist, so I study the phenomenon and I don’t necessarily provide.
00:23:14 Dr Max Werner
Immediately you know solutions to how to deal with earthquakes. Of course, some of my work directly goes into so-called seismic hazard maps, which are the the maps that show probability of of future ground shaking which what, which is what engineers use to design to, to.
00:23:34 Dr Max Werner
Designed buildings that are safe from fire.
00:23:36 Dr Max Werner
Earthquakes. But I’m not typically involved in in these kinds of discussions, so I I sort of, you know, I there’s sort of a clearly defined limit to my discipline and at that limit you know I I sort of you know sort of end my my work if you like and and generate something that is then hopefully used by by others and in this project.
00:23:57 Dr Max Werner
I really had the chance to peak well beyond that boundary and.
00:24:02 Dr Max Werner
Talked to uh, you know, the Bhutanese government and NGO’s and.
00:24:09 Dr Max Werner
And the public to about, you know, how one might go about developing strategies for building resilience to to future earthquakes, of the kind that were recorded in these historical texts and. And it was really there that I learned that, you know, seismology and science can only take you so far.
00:24:31 Dr Max Werner
And it was, you know, it’s an obvious point, but, you know, still an important one to make that there’s probably enough that we know about future earthquakes that lead to very actionable.
00:24:47 Dr Max Werner
You know, consequences and and and concrete policies that can apply similarly to climate change. Where I think there’s still lots of unknowns and yet we know sufficiently much to, you know, have put the right policies in place to.
00:25:07 Dr Max Werner
Build resilience to to coming climate change and and to avoid hopefully some of the.
00:25:15 Dr Max Werner
Some of the worst.
00:25:17 Dr Max Werner
So, you know, having having these colleagues across the different disciplines and having broad, far ranging discussions around you know what in the end is actually generating, uh, the impact of an earthquake was really, you know, I I I really learned a lot and and.
00:25:36 Dr Max Werner
It opened my eyes to other ways of of helping people connect with the threat as a as a as a scientist. And I I like to, you know, talk about the earthquake as a scientific phenomena.
00:25:47 Dr Max Werner
No, but actually through art through uh, you know, through media and other tools, you can get people’s attention in a way that science can’t.
00:26:01 Dr Max Werner
And so it’s, you know, very powerful tools for building resilience that as a as a seismologist are not in my immediate toolkit, if you like.
00:26:12 Dr Daniel Haines
I do think that seismologists and other earth scientists are really good science communicators, though, and this wasn’t something I appreciated before I started working with you and and with other scientists I’ve encountered in other contexts because people would often say to me, well, having project meetings or or.
00:26:32 Dr Daniel Haines
Planning for research grants and that sort of thing that they wanted, humanity, scholars involved historians like me because we understand people and we understand culture and that sort of thing. But actually you guys have been doing it for decades.
00:26:46 Dr Daniel Haines
Scientists are really quite sophisticated scientists, anyway, are really quite sophisticated in the way that you communicate scientific physical processes and earth processes and and why it all matters. So I think I’ve learned a huge amount actually from stepping into that world in which the kind of work you do.
00:27:06 Dr Daniel Haines
There’s so much more immediately applicable to real world problems than most academic history. Certainly the kind of academic history that I’ve been doing before.
00:27:17 Dr Daniel Haines
So I would I would.
00:27:19 Dr Daniel Haines
Say that although you might feel as a seismologist, your scope is quite narrow. I think you’re part of the community of scholars who have learned a lot of the important lessons about how.
00:27:30 Dr Daniel Haines
To translate that kind.
00:27:31 Dr Daniel Haines
Of academic knowledge into the real world.
00:27:34 Dr Max Werner
And I think we see that that’s an interesting point and I think we see some of that.
00:27:40 Dr Max Werner
In the climate change community, I I think the climate change community has really understood that. Uh, in order to connect with uh policymakers and and connect with people, you need to translate results. Uh scientific insights in.
00:27:56 Dr Max Werner
To UM and to clear sort of messages and, you know, actionable information and it’s interesting, you know, thinking about our work in the context of climate change, which I’m I’m no expert on, but you know, thinking of.
00:28:16 Dr Max Werner
Tan in in the Himalaya in in particular in. In that context there are links between.
00:28:23 Dr Max Werner
Uh, sort of the.
00:28:26 Dr Max Werner
Atmosphere. The oceans and the solid earth.
00:28:30 Dr Max Werner
Again, typically in in the disciplines, these have been sort of, you know, separated and and people have either studied climate and the atmospheres or they’ve, you know, concentrated on on the ground below like me. But there are increasingly, you know, connections revealed between sort of the fluid.
00:28:50
And.
00:28:51 Dr Max Werner
Atmosphere and oceans as Andy uh. Solid earth. Uh. So for instance, in again in my field, uh there are clear lines of evidence that some earthquakes. So some seismicity patterns are affected by, you know, weather.
00:29:12 Dr Max Werner
Meteorology and and and and and climate patterns.
00:29:16 Dr Max Werner
So along the Himalaya.
00:29:17 Dr Max Werner
In particular, there’s some evidence that suggests that the rate of seismicity sort of modulated by the the slow pack.
00:29:25 Dr Max Werner
And you know, there’s so you know there’s a there’s a link here between the snowpack glaciation, rain, the monsoon patterns and the rate of earthquakes, that’s, you know, so the the link.
00:29:45 Dr Max Werner
There exists very clearly along the Himalaya, and it may exist elsewhere. Also, don’t have clear evidence for that. Perhaps yet perhaps we won’t ever find that. Or perhaps it doesn’t exist. But clearly along the Himalaya that that.
00:30:02 Dr Max Werner
The case, so one of the things I I worry about is, you know, if glaciers continue melting and the Himalayan the way that they do those might lead to glacial lakes becoming quite full and and fuller than they already are.
00:30:23 Dr Max Werner
And couple that with an increased rate of earthquakes, even if they’re moderate earthquakes.
00:30:29 Dr Max Werner
They might lead to the kind of ground shaking that would potentially, you know, break one of the, you know, natural or artificial barriers that these glacial lakes have from bursting out into valleys below them. And so these so-called clothes. So glacial lake.
00:30:48 Dr Max Werner
Outburst floods may be a a significant threat to Bhutan in the future because of the combined sort of climate change and earthquake link.
00:31:02 Dr Max Werner
And you know, there’s there’s colleagues here in Earth sciences that are studying that directly, such as Byron Adams. And, you know, it’s it’s it’s something I think.
00:31:14 Dr Max Werner
We need to.
00:31:15 Dr Max Werner
Worry about, you know. I guess the broader point here is that, you know, there’s.
00:31:20 Dr Max Werner
There’s quite subtle.
00:31:22 Dr Max Werner
Connections between different systems in in nature, and so climate change is is not just sort of its.
00:31:30 Dr Max Werner
You know, it’s already such a vast, you know, the the effect of climate change on on us are already so vast that there’s also all these connections that are just that, are that we’re still, you know, investigating and still discovering at the moment, such as the link to the solid earth and and how potentially earthquakes might then feed back to.
00:31:52 Dr Max Werner
Glacier Lake outbursts and and the flooding that ensues from from that. So there’s some, you know, and then that also connects to, of course hydropower.
00:32:00 Dr Max Werner
and sort of the economic, uh, uh dimension of things. So it’s it’s very it’s very interconnected and and much more interconnected than I I fear we have a a grasp of.
00:32:15 Dr Daniel Haines
Another thing on that front that I I learned from work that I did after our collaborative project finished. I went on to uh, do a more traditional history project where I wasn’t working with science scientists, but I was very inspired by the kind of conversations we’ve had and what I’d learned from working with you.
00:32:35 Dr Daniel Haines
And and the others are embrace.
00:32:37 Dr Daniel Haines
And I was looking at early 20th century and late 19th century earthquakes across what was at the time British India. So in modern terms, India, Pakistan and Myanmar and also in Nepal, which was independent and so much of the impact of the earthquakes, I was looking at.
00:32:57 Dr Daniel Haines
Was actually not the ground shaking and the buildings collapsing. That was, of course, one of the main sources of of mortality and damage and and catastrophic in all the ways that you would expect if, like me, you grew up in the 90s watching disaster movies, but actually it was water.
00:33:14 Dr Daniel Haines
That was the surprising sort of wild card factor that I hadn’t been expecting to see before those conversations with you and Francis and Byron, because so often it was floods changes in river levels, damage to agricultural land and the the associated health impacts of flooding.
00:33:33 Dr Daniel Haines
Which really were responsible for a lot of deaths. So in 1897 that that same earthquake that we discussed this year on earthquake, the official death count in in India.
00:33:48 Dr Daniel Haines
About 1500. So that’s the number of people that the government attributed the number of people who died and the government attributed that directly to the earthquake. So people on whom buildings collapsed and and were other ways caught up in that initial period of shaking. But if you go through the provincial reports.
00:34:07 Dr Daniel Haines
For the next couple of years, it becomes clear that 33,000 people died in a cholera epidemic shortly after the earthquake. And although I didn’t find corroborating evidence, the officials who are writing the reports thought that the cholera epidemic had broken out because of the flooding that the earthquake.
00:34:26 Dr Daniel Haines
Courts and another earthquake in 1950 and the nearly the same region again caused severe flooding which lasted for at least 10 years. I only tracked it through the archive for the following ten years, but significantly more severe flooding for good 10 years. And so earthquakes have all these spillover effects that link up very closely.
00:34:47 Dr Daniel Haines
With.
00:34:48 Dr Daniel Haines
What we.
00:34:49 Dr Daniel Haines
Climate change, which broadly speaking, is less stable precipitation, so more flooding and more droughts, especially in South Asia and the Himalaya.
00:34:58 Dr Daniel Haines
And this really made me think that when we’re discussing earthquakes and how to build resilience against earthquakes, we’ve really got to bear in mind these longer term effects that are harder to see. If you just think of an earthquake as.
00:35:12 Dr Daniel Haines
The the the few minutes of shaking the collapses buildings and that actually they have these much longer term or even medium term in an intensive sense impacts on the landscape and therefore also impacts on the people.
00:35:26 Dr Max Werner
Yeah, absolutely. And of course, you know, over the long term, there’s some interesting complicated questions around how climate.
00:35:33 Dr Max Werner
It and erosion and mountain building all you know form 1 system together to, you know change landscapes and affect. You know there’s all.
00:35:47 Dr Max Werner
Sorts of cross.
00:35:48 Dr Max Werner
Sort of connections between these and the much longer term. So yeah, that’s that’s certainly a really interesting.
00:35:54 Dr Max Werner
Field of study I I was interested in, you know, sort of a specific question because I I I study one aspect I study about.
00:36:04 Dr Max Werner
This is that, you know, they never come alone, right. They always bring with them all their aftershocks and sometimes those aftershocks are larger than the earthquake. What? That we we call the main shock.
00:36:16 Dr Daniel Haines
So one thing I really learned from you is to rethink the definition of what an earthquake is, because I’d always thought of four shocks and aftershocks as.
00:36:26 Dr Daniel Haines
Subsidiary to the main earthquake. What I would think of as the main earthquake and you explained to me that from your point of view, every shock is a separate earthquake and they come in sequences and and that makes what we term the earthquake is basically a human choice. It’s usually related to the fact that it was the biggest one that did the most damage.
00:36:47 Dr Daniel Haines
Part of the sequence of shocks, but it’s still an act of naming. It’s it’s not something that comes from nature. It’s something that comes from society.
00:36:55 Dr Daniel Haines
And and.
00:36:58 Dr Daniel Haines
There were definitely numerous recorded for and aftershocks in all of the earthquakes that I looked at historically and in fact.
00:37:07 Dr Daniel Haines
If you if.
00:37:07 Dr Daniel Haines
You read accounts of the 1950 earthquake, which was up in what is now called Arunachal Pradesh on the in the Borderlands between India and China.
00:37:19 Dr Daniel Haines
The the main shock occurred at about I think it was 8:00 PM or maybe 10:00 PM, but substantial aftershocks were going on right until dawn broke the next day and the actual impact on people who experienced that was really, really profound. Because once the main shocks happened, people were then.
00:37:39 Dr Daniel Haines
Frightened and really prone to over overreacting inverted commas from their point of view, it’s quite rational to go out of the building when you felt another shock because you didn’t know if it was going to be another really, really big shock that was likely to collapse the building.
00:37:53 Dr Daniel Haines
But it really made me think from the point of view of people who lived through earthquakes, how does it all feel and how does it fit together as an experience? And although this isn’t something I have the the knowledge and expertise to have a a professional opinion on what is the kind of mental health implication of living through an earthquake.
00:38:12 Dr Daniel Haines
And the way it changes people’s relationship with land.
00:38:15 Dr Daniel Haines
Escape because it’s it’s pretty clear from accounts from quarter, which is now in a Western Pakistan where there was a really big earthquake in 1935 that affected a a, a very big British community because it was a Garrison town. There were lots of a British soldiers there and their families and and it it really.
00:38:35 Dr Daniel Haines
Transform the way that these people talked about quarter, which was it’s quite high, it’s about 5000 feet elevation. So it had from a British point of view quite pleasant seasons. It was relatively cool in the summer, it snowed in the winter. There were a lot of bricks around. So they had a.
00:38:52 Dr Daniel Haines
Sort of familiar social life with tennis courts and dances and so on. And and the earthquake happened. And from then on quarter is really described as a as a place of devastation and a lot of fear is attached to to the physical environment there, particularly landslips. So post post, earthquake landslips.
00:39:13 Dr Daniel Haines
Some of which were generated directly by major aftershocks, and some of which were just destabilised slopes that eventually.
00:39:21 Dr Daniel Haines
But there are numerous accounts of how frightening it was to see and hear these landslips which were happening outside the city. So the observers I’m talking about weren’t in any danger. But still, those psychological impacts of surviving an earthquake really stuck with people and had.
00:39:36 Dr Daniel Haines
Important impacts on their lives. So really mental health is is one of the I think.
00:39:43 Dr Daniel Haines
That that aspect of earthquake resilience and recovery, but we really need to think about arguably even more than we already do.
00:39:51 Dr Max Werner
Yeah, that’s that’s a, that’s an interesting point. You know the the sort of the the drawn out nature we talk about the earthquake or the main shock while while actually you know earthquakes, you know don’t come alone that these sequences and sometimes these sequences can last, you know months and even years and.
00:40:11 Dr Max Werner
In some cases, perhaps decades.
00:40:13 Dr Max Werner
And and and the impact that you know this extended period can have on on mental health, uh, but public health as well as you’ve studied. Yeah. Can be really, really drawn out. You mentioned you know the the work that you subsequently did to sort of embrace Bhutan project and I wanted to ask you.
00:40:33 Dr Max Werner
More about that you know how did how.
00:40:36 Dr Max Werner
Did the you mentioned?
00:40:37 Dr Max Werner
In a in a in a different sort of a number of different ways already. But how did you know? How did Brace sort of help you, you know, make the next step? And I think one of the you had a a major successful proposal bid called.
00:40:58 Dr Max Werner
Broken ground.
00:40:59 Dr Max Werner
And so clearly inspired by by earthquakes and and perhaps to some extent by by your experience and embrace. You know. How how did you know the interdisciplinary work that you’ve done, how did that shape that project and, you know, tell us a little bit about about that project and and what you found.
00:41:20 Dr Daniel Haines
Well, thanks for the plug, Max. I appreciate that. And and I’ll ask you the same question in a moment. Really it’s hard to pinpoint any specific.
00:41:29 Dr Daniel Haines
Bit of knowledge that I acquired embraced, but it was more the general sense of.
00:41:35 Dr Daniel Haines
Understanding how those physical processes played out and and particularly the complexity of the way that an earthquake interacts with different bits of topography. So an earthquake on an alluvial plane is different to an earthquake on the side of a mountain because the rock is different because the verticality or otherwise.
00:41:56 Dr Daniel Haines
The landscape.
00:41:57 Dr Daniel Haines
Changes the kind of dangers that people are.
00:42:00 Dr Daniel Haines
Place and it really made me think of earthquakes as things that play out across a different area in lots of different ways, sometimes at the same time, and sometimes in sequence. So like we talked about land slips earlier, which can happen days, weeks, even months, after the main shock of an earthquake.
00:42:20 Dr Daniel Haines
And often it’s only when the rainy season comes round in South Asia after an earthquake that you find out whether soil is stable or not, or whether the side of the slope is stable or not. And and I know that as scientists have.
00:42:33 Dr Daniel Haines
Been doing a lot of work in Nepal looking at sleep stability after the 25th 15 earthquake there in the context of landslides, so I was really thinking about this really dynamic way that earthquakes have an impact on the the natural environment as opposed to most earthquake histories that I’ve read with with a couple of.
00:42:54 Dr Daniel Haines
Notable exceptions, but the few times the historians have written written academic books about earthquakes, they really tend to be focused on urban stories on cities. So.
00:43:05 Dr Daniel Haines
There’s a fair amount of work on the Lisbon earthquake senani disaster in in the mid 1800s. Sorry, the mid 1700s, mid 18th century as well. I meant which is is very much a story of urban destruction and then urban regeneration and the kind of politics of the redesign of central parts of Lisbon.
00:43:23 Dr Daniel Haines
And all of this stuff is is relevant to the Himalaya and South Asia because there are big.
00:43:28 Dr Daniel Haines
Cities, but also a lot of the region is rural, is upland. We’re not looking at these, these large urban contexts where these familiar kinds of political story play out and actually you need a much more holistic understanding of the environmental phenomenon that an earthquake is in order to really analyze.
00:43:49 Dr Daniel Haines
What impact it had on society and politics?
00:43:52 Dr Max Werner
And you also mentioned that you you did some work in in Nepal as well, not about the same time also as part of an interdisciplinary.
00:44:04 Dr Max Werner
Project. Maybe you know, maybe it’s time to shift our conversation a little bit. We’ve we’ve talked about, you know, the I think the the joys of interdisciplinary work and how much we’ve enjoyed it and the things that we’ve.
00:44:20 Dr Max Werner
Learned.
00:44:21 Dr Max Werner
But there are some clear challenges also to to interdisciplinary.
00:44:24 Dr Max Werner
Work.
00:44:26 Dr Max Werner
And I was. I was wondering, you know.
00:44:29 Dr Max Werner
If.
00:44:30 Dr Max Werner
You had any? Any thoughts on you know, what did you see as sort of the major challenge?
00:44:36 Dr Max Werner
This in our interdisciplinary work that we’ve done together.
00:44:40 Dr Daniel Haines
It takes a long time to get going and I think from that initial coffee shop meet that you and I had, I think it was a good couple of years before we started talking to Francis Cooper and cooking up the idea for what eventually became the brace.
00:44:56 Dr Daniel Haines
Project as assuming I’m remembering.
00:45:01 Dr Daniel Haines
And it was really the environment that the Cabot Institute fostered that culture of being able to meet up and have conversations, these kinds of interdisciplinary conversations go to go to social main goals and go to seminars and so on and keep meeting people and keep talking.
00:45:20 Dr Daniel Haines
To each other that I think gave us the space to to develop a relationship, which meant that when the opportunity came around the funding opportunity we were, we were kind of ready to go.
00:45:30 Dr Daniel Haines
For it, so I think we’d had the idea sometime before and we were waiting for a appropriate funding scheme to come.
00:45:35 Dr Max Werner
Up. So I think that, yeah, that that highlights a a couple of issues that are also on my mind one.
00:45:40 Dr Max Werner
Is.
00:45:42 Dr Max Werner
There’s.
00:45:43 Dr Max Werner
Not much funding for interdisciplinary work.
00:45:47 Dr Max Werner
UM and there are few venues for, you know, building trusting uh collaborations.
00:45:58 Dr Max Werner
So the Cabin Institute is is really quite unique in that sense. You know, at the various different universities that I’ve been to before. I can’t think of one that had, you know, one that so enthusiastically embraced interdisciplinarity. And that’s what drew me to the University of Bristol.
00:46:18 Dr Max Werner
In addition to other factors.
00:46:21 Dr Max Werner
And uh, so the there’s often, you know, we tend to sit in our silos, in our schools and departments and and faculties and the administrative way in which we work makes it difficult to, you know, I think find like minded.
00:46:40 Dr Max Werner
Or differently minded academics, and that we can have use for productive exchanges with there’s also.
00:46:48 Dr Max Werner
You know that the the funding for the disciplinary work is is quite restricted. I think there’s an increasing sense that into this interdisciplinary work and has a lot of benefits and and in many ways it’s it’s crucial to solving some of the hardest problems that.
00:47:07 Dr Max Werner
We need to face in society.
00:47:11 Dr Max Werner
And the global challenges Research Fund was really a pretty amazing opportunity to conduct that work. And of course it was very disappointing to learn that that funding had been cut back.
00:47:30 Dr Max Werner
Very significantly, and you know that left a lot of projects sort of hanging in the balance.
00:47:38
And.
00:47:40 Dr Max Werner
Others can articulate that much better, but it.
00:47:43 Dr Max Werner
It really is. It’s.
00:47:44 Dr Max Werner
It’s a shame for my perspective that global Talent Research Fund has been cut back significantly, and that the entire overseas development aid program has been cut back quite significantly. So I think funding.
00:47:59 Dr Max Werner
Is is really a a challenge?
00:48:02 Dr Max Werner
And then you, you.
00:48:02 Dr Max Werner
Mentioned it takes a long time.
00:48:05 Dr Max Werner
And you know, I as you pointed out, you know, our other colleagues were also scientists, and yet it took me a long time to understand some of the jargon that they used even or explaining the concepts that they used for helping me understand landscape evolution.
00:48:24 Dr Max Werner
And its relation to tectonics and the climate.
00:48:30 Dr Max Werner
But when you cross boundaries into another discipline, you have to learn new concepts, new new jargon and and. And you have to understand the criteria by which that discipline measures, measures, quality or or what are the sort of the the the reference points that.
00:48:48 Dr Max Werner
Make studies interesting. Uh, so that you know there’s a long, uh ramp up to becoming, you know, a product.
00:48:58 Dr Max Werner
Team and, you know that that of course is reflected in in publication outputs. Uh. And unfortunately we are often judged by by these metrics. So there’s a significant risk I think to many scholars, especially those still trying to build their their careers.
00:49:18 Dr Max Werner
To doing into this in the plenary work because it takes a long time, it’s it’s hard to find the right place for publishing that work and the funding opportunities are are relatively rare.
00:49:32 Dr Max Werner
So those are some of the challenges.
00:49:33 Dr Max Werner
That I I’ve seen.
00:49:35 Dr Daniel Haines
Yeah, I do remember sitting in the back of the Jeep with you in Bhutan, I think on the way to panaca specifically where we were discussing the the kind of work we were doing in Brace couldn’t be the sustainable basis for developing either of our professional careers because it wasn’t the type of research that.
00:49:55 Dr Daniel Haines
Our disciplines really value in terms of what what is the marker of being a successful historian or a successful seismologist. Funding is like everyone likes getting funding, so that was good and interdisciplinary work is kind of bonus points for our academic.
00:50:14 Dr Daniel Haines
Profiles really, and the the core disciplinary work you do is what your reputation in your discipline really stands on.
00:50:21 Dr Max Werner
Yeah. And and I you know, there is an argument to be made that strong interdisciplinary work requires strong disciplines.
00:50:29 Dr Max Werner
But I I think you know these these challenges I think continue to present barriers to to progress and you know especially a lot of the problems that we we try to find solutions for like climate change like the impact of of earthquakes require into disciplinary solution.
00:50:49 Dr Max Werner
And yet, you know the funding, you know, primarily is still focused on specific specific disciplines.
00:50:59 Dr Daniel Haines
I wondered if we could say a little bit more about the actual work we did on Bhutan and what we discovered you want to talk about your work with KATSU and so on. And then I’ll talk about the check.
00:51:10 Dr Max Werner
Sure. Yeah.
00:51:12 Dr Max Werner
So what that there’s sort?
00:51:14 Dr Max Werner
Of a number of different things that came out of the the BRACE project and and as we’ve discussed, you know in these interdisciplinary projects, things tend tend to take a little bit more time. So these papers are still maturing, so.
00:51:26 Dr Max Werner
One of the things we.
00:51:28 Dr Max Werner
We did for Bhutan is to build a a model.
00:51:32 Dr Max Werner
Of future earthquakes?
00:51:35 Dr Max Werner
So we, you know, on the basis of of instrumental records, historical records, we constrained the rate of earthquakes in, in the region. We compiled information about geological fault lines including the plate boundary as well as some some of the.
00:51:54 Dr Max Werner
Faults in the area, including the uh faults, that’s around the Shillong Plateau that hosted the 191897 Shillong earthquake and.
00:52:07 Dr Max Werner
Students of mine Katie James just completed her Masters project in calculating the resulting ground motions that Bhutan might experience over the next 5500 and 2500 years, and those are based on.
00:52:27 Dr Max Werner
On probabilistic sort of estimates of you know, what kinds of ground motion a particular magnitude earthquake somewhere might generate?
00:52:36 Dr Max Werner
And the kinds of numbers that, uh she found are a little bit more reassuring than the ones that have previously been published. Uh last year.
00:52:49 Dr Max Werner
So that’s that, that estimate from a different author last year was was really shockingly high.
00:52:58 Dr Max Werner
And you know, would have called into question whether the current building code for earthquake safe buildings would be appropriate. And Katie’s most recent numbers suggest that things are not quite as bad as.
00:53:17 Dr Max Werner
Concluded by this previous author. So that’s a little.
00:53:20 Dr Max Werner
Bit more reassuring.
00:53:22 Dr Max Werner
The broader message, though, is that we’re still missing a lot of data to make more precise probability estimates of of what might happen in the future.
00:53:33 Dr Max Werner
So we need urgently more seismic data from Bhutan. We need more geological data from Bhutan and of course, we need more historical data from Bhutan and and maybe let me just mention that Kasuga, who was at University of Bristol.
00:53:52 Dr Max Werner
And it was now at the University of Western Ontario and Canada was really instrumental also in helping.
00:54:00 Dr Max Werner
With these calculations, but the historical data are important and and this is where you.
00:54:07 Dr Daniel Haines
Come in, mainly acting as a as a conduit between the scientists on the team and the real experts under Karma Punso, who we should mention that our work in Bhutan was in collaboration with.
00:54:20 Dr Daniel Haines
As Max has said, various Bhutanese agencies, one of which was the Lowden Foundation, which is a a cultural research and and cultural affair NGO.
00:54:32 Dr Daniel Haines
it’s director Karma Fonso, who is is one of the the most respected historians of Bhutan and one of the few Bhutanese scholars who’s published extensively in English on the country’s history, but is also an expert in reading choke texts.
00:54:51 Dr Daniel Haines
Which are written in a A, a dialect of Classical Tibetan, which is the language that religious spiritual texts and biographies of historical and religious figures have been written in, in Bhutan for for several hundreds of years.
00:55:07 Dr Daniel Haines
And what our brief period of field work basically revealed was that it was not possible for us with our expertise and the amount of time and resource we had to.
00:55:17 Dr Daniel Haines
Really.
00:55:19 Dr Daniel Haines
Get into the historical text and really find new information. So Karma organized a group of.
00:55:28 Dr Daniel Haines
Well respected scholars in Tempu who could understand Chucky and particularly.
00:55:34 Dr Daniel Haines
Were able to.
00:55:34 Dr Daniel Haines
Deal with the complexity of the literary forms of checkmate texts, where meaning is often allegorical, metaphorical, and you sometimes need to read the whole of the text.
00:55:47 Dr Daniel Haines
And at the end you understand the meaning of what came before, so it’s not as straightforward as just reading it sentence by sentence. And and he coordinated this group of scholars to work on somewhere north of 20. Biographies of historical figures.
00:56:04 Dr Daniel Haines
Dating back from the 600 CE up to the 19th century, which recorded various seismic well, not necessarily seismic, but recorded accounts of tremors and various other environmental phenomena.
00:56:19 Dr Daniel Haines
And and it was really striking to me how they these always.
00:56:24 Dr Daniel Haines
Drawing the idea of of a Buddhist moral universe in which human action and and spiritual action had an impact on the physical realm, and this is something you also see in Nepali accounts of the 1934 earthquake. If if you look at the Nepali sources.
00:56:44 Dr Daniel Haines
Because it it’s kind of common to to various systems of thinking in South Asia and the human.
00:56:48 Dr Daniel Haines
Yeah. And so it’s not always possible to tell whether what looks like an earthquake to us is appearing in a text as a metaphor or as as a symbol of something, or whether it’s literally referring to to an earthquake. And actually one of the things that the monks we spoke to were interested in was.
00:57:09 Dr Daniel Haines
Passing out the differences between.
00:57:12 Dr Daniel Haines
Spiritual earthquakes if you like, and physical earthquakes and so comma that the work is still ongoing, I understand, but karmas preliminary results showed many, many instances of accounts of tremors and in some of them we can peg them. We can correlate them to what we know.
00:57:32 Dr Daniel Haines
From other sources about physical earthquakes.
00:57:36 Dr Daniel Haines
Including the 1714 earthquake which we discussed earlier and the 1897.
00:57:43 Dr Daniel Haines
but actually nailing down the exact times places uh, durations of these earthquakes is going to be really difficult. And that is one of the big challenges that this kind of interdisciplinary work. How do you integrate this very busy, nuanced qualitative historical data?
00:58:02 Dr Daniel Haines
Which relies heavily on interpretation into the kind of rigorous modelling that you spend most of your.
00:58:09 Dr Daniel Haines
Time doing.
00:58:10 Dr Max Werner
Yeah. I I I think that those are some, you know, great interdisciplinary questions because there’s clearly information there.
00:58:18 Dr Max Werner
And much of seismology would you know, discount. Uh, you know, that information has been not being sufficiently precise to be incorporated in, you know, formal computer models of of of what might of, say, the earthquake rate and how that might affect future.
00:58:38
Uh.
00:58:38 Dr Max Werner
Earthquakes and and yet you know, there’s clearly information that we have. And so you know, describing that information with the appropriate uncertainty and understanding the sensitivity of our projections into the future on these uncertain constraints, I think make you know great.
00:58:59 Dr Max Werner
Interdisciplinary questions.
00:59:02 Dr Max Werner
Of course, there’s also there’s this whole, you know, Detective uh, you know, story or or this puzzle for how the historical information, uh, might or might not connect with other geological, Paleo, seismological data that.
00:59:21 Dr Max Werner
You know, we we might one day extract, or perhaps have already obtained. And you know, there’s there’s interesting those, those also pose problems of uncertainty. Uh so geological information might tell you. OK, there’s a there’s a there’s a fault here.
00:59:39 Dr Max Werner
So it has had an earthquake, but we don’t know anything about when that may have occurred or how frequently these these earthquakes can recur.
00:59:51 Dr Max Werner
Similarly, you know, pay your seismic studies. So basically when you know trenches are dug across faults and you know they they try to date the material in those trenches to try to understand the frequency of earthquakes. And when they occurred, that information is also fraught with uncertainty.
01:00:10 Dr Max Werner
And yet we are able to, in some cases at least, you know, connect the sort of the historical to the Paleo seismological, to the geological and strengthen the confidence in in that data and use that with more confidence for making projections into the future.
01:00:30 Dr Max Werner
Uh, so you know, describing that information with appropriate sort of uncertainty, uh, quantifying that uncertainty and then and then feeding that through the models is is, you know really great into this binary project.
01:00:46 Dr Daniel Haines
Do you earthquake scientists still make any use of observational data, as in just people who’ve seen earthquakes happen? Does that feed in at all anymore?
01:00:58 Dr Max Werner
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Ohh.
01:01:00 Dr Max Werner
A lot, in fact. Uh, increasingly so again with social media and mobile phones in in a in a whole variety of ways. I think citizens, the public, you know, citizen science, the public have become much more involved.
01:01:19 Dr Max Werner
Again in data collection.
01:01:21 Dr Max Werner
Than they have been in the past. Partially that’s because apps might be monitoring, shaking so specific seismological apps on your phone might be recording earthquakes. People are also encouraged to go and.
01:01:41 Dr Max Werner
Fill out questionnaires on the web after an earthquake. Uh, so-called. Did you feel it? Databases. So you know, for us, that’s a great source of information because we don’t have seismometers everywhere.
01:01:56 Dr Max Werner
And there’s a lot of people and a lot of.
01:01:59 Dr Max Werner
Them have phones.
01:02:00 Dr Max Werner
And so when they give us information about, you know, how strong the shaking was that they perceived, that helps us constrain, let’s say, the spatial footprint of the seismic waves that traveled outward. That helps us.
01:02:16 Dr Max Werner
Constrain. Maybe the damage outline of of a major earthquake?
01:02:21 Dr Max Werner
And it’s it’s a.
01:02:24 Dr Max Werner
It also helps us, you know, social scientists are also starting to study that that data, because it, you know, under certain circumstances, people are much more perceptive of the ground shaking than in others. So this links, for instance, with human induced seismicity, such as seismicity induced.
01:02:44 Dr Max Werner
By deep geothermal exploration, or shale gas development, hydraulic fracturing, or commonly known fracking, when those little usually small earthquakes are.
01:03:00 Dr Max Werner
Boost the way that people record them is quite different from, you know, the population of Los Angeles reacting to yet another magnitude 2.5 that occurs quite frequently. So you know, these are interesting data sets, you know, not quite the eyewitness accounts.
01:03:21 Dr Max Werner
Of that would have been collected by the Geological Survey of India after the 1897 Shalom.
01:03:29 Dr Max Werner
Earthquake but certainly sort of the data that we can gather from people, especially people with phones, has really making having quite an impact on the disciplining.
01:03:43 Dr Daniel Haines
That’s really fascinating. And you mentioned the 1897 earthquake again, and I don’t know if you have a a saw the report, but Rd. Oldham, who was the head of the Indian Geological Survey.
01:03:55 Dr Daniel Haines
Wrote up a report on that earthquake and he’d done what we would now call a citizen science projects as part of this, where he sent out thousands of questionnaires across North East India in in fact, across the whole country because it was felt as far as away as South India asking certain people.
01:04:15 Dr Daniel Haines
I mean, this was India in the 1890s, so he wasn’t asking everyone but asking people he thought were respectable, like the Heads of Telegraph offices and senior railway staff and government officials.
01:04:27 Dr Daniel Haines
To record what they felt, what they heard, what they saw and timing. And this was partly because you wanted to get a better handle on how quickly the earthquake wave propagated along the surface. And so you wanted to know the timing and duration of the shock and the speed of.
01:04:44 Dr Daniel Haines
The earthquake wave.
01:04:47 Dr Daniel Haines
There’s this fantastic.
01:04:48 Dr Daniel Haines
Chapter of this report where he basically spends several paragraphs just complaining about how unreliable humans are talking about the the sort of poor time keeping practices of people. But then if.
01:05:00 Dr Daniel Haines
You go through.
01:05:01 Dr Daniel Haines
The the way he Marshalls the evidence.
01:05:04 Dr Daniel Haines
He’s doing quite careful qualitative work to pass out how reliable he thinks the witnesses. So if the witness mentioned that they had a pocket watch, which they sat every day by the sound of the local guns, which in turn drew their timing from the Telegraph office, which received a signal pulse from the Central office.
01:05:24 Dr Daniel Haines
That this gave you.
01:05:25 Dr Daniel Haines
Better sense of the reliability of someone’s report as opposed to people who are, say, in a in a really small station somewhere. But it didn’t have a a reliable clock, let alone a Telegraph pulse, to set its clock back. So I think there’s this problem of fuzzy data and qualitative.
01:05:45 Dr Daniel Haines
Data and everyday people observing earthquakes is something.
01:05:50 Dr Daniel Haines
Earthquake scientists have actually been dealing with for a.
01:05:52 Dr Max Werner
Long time. Yeah, that’s a that’s a really interesting point. And it, you know that that also really connects with, you know, the the data and and how it’s, you know and and today sort of data-driven world you know how all those data challenges.
01:06:11 Dr Max Werner
For how you use data that you know.
01:06:15 Dr Max Werner
Was reflect sort of human behavior. Of course, dealing with, you know, the the, the biases and and dealing with the uncertainty around that is is a is a huge huge topic and you know that that’s really that’s a fascinating account.
01:06:35 Dr Daniel Haines
And that plays in closely to my my key take away, which is just to remind us that.
01:06:42 Dr Daniel Haines
And to solve the problems that posed by things like earthquakes and climate change, you really need to bring together scientific data and infrastructure with people. And that goes for the solutions that we look at. So building people into resilience plans, but also the way we generate data that we really need this kind of interdisciplinary work that.
01:07:03 Dr Daniel Haines
Can draw on.
01:07:04 Dr Daniel Haines
Lots of different types of information and try and synthesize it. Say something helpful.
01:07:10 Dr Daniel Haines
And that, fundamentally, there’s no such thing as a as a technical solution to earthquakes or to climate change.
01:07:16 Dr Max Werner
Yeah, I I couldn’t agree more, Dan. That was really well said. I I completely agree that you know, these complex problems require interdisciplinary solutions. We need support for finding those in the disciplinary solutions.
01:07:32 Dr Max Werner
That can be in the form of of institutes that facilitate connections between, you know, in our case of historian and the.
01:07:40 Dr Max Werner
Just and many others, and we need support, of course, for funding our partners overseas and and as well as locally. And we need sustained funding and we need universities to recognize the.
01:08:01 Dr Max Werner
And the importance of interdisciplinary work and and to to facilitate that between our different academic silos and finally maybe.
01:08:12 Dr Max Werner
You know.
01:08:14
Our.
01:08:14 Dr Max Werner
Work together as, as you know, really opened my eyes to the myriad ways in which.
01:08:21 Dr Max Werner
You know, natural phenomena interact with society and humans and how humans, you know, shape the environment for such that natural phenomena you.
01:08:32 Dr Max Werner
Know.
01:08:34 Dr Max Werner
Have different effects.
01:08:35 Dr Max Werner
Uhm, it’s it’s a very complex interacting, you know system and and the effect of earthquakes to sort of ripple through this very complicated environmental infrastructure system. And and it’s very difficult to to pinpoint the exact.
01:08:55 Dr Max Werner
Ways in which you know future earthquakes might have disastrous outcomes, but we need to study the entire system as a.
01:09:04 Dr Max Werner
Goal and we need to understand to what extent climate change and how climate change will affect even this complicated interaction.
01:09:22 Cabot Institute
You can find out more about the Cabot Institute for the environment at bristol.ac.uk/cabot.
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