The Great Quake Debate: The Crusader, the Skeptic, and the Rise of Modern Seismology

Hough (Earthshaking Science), former president of the Seismological Society of America, blends science and history in her occasionally illuminating but overstretched study of geological controversies of the early 20th century. Focusing on the then-pressing question of whether the Los Angeles area faced “significant earthquake hazard,” she intertwines the stories of two preeminent geologists, Bailey Willis and Robert Thomas Hill. Willis supposedly announced in 1925 that a severe L.A. quake was imminent, but, as Hough demonstrates, this was exaggerated by irresponsible reporters, who ignored Willis’s significant qualifications—he said no one could know exactly when the quake would occur—to turn his speculation into a definitive statement that the disaster would happen in 10 years. Similarly, in 1928 Hill published Southern California Geology and Los Angeles Earthquakes; though he had publicly disagreed with Willis that a major quake was at all likely, he intended the book as a sober scientific work, and was dismayed when his publishers issued it with a cover blurb directly refuting Willis’s statements and stating that L.A. was the city safest “from Acts of God” in the U.S. Though Hough’s subject might have made for an intriguing article, at full book-length it makes for a thin work. (July)