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| COSTING THE EARTH
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| | | Costing the Earth tells stories which touch all our lives, looking at man's effect on the environment and at how the environment reacts. It questions accepted truths, challenges the people in charge and reports on progress towards improving the world we live in. | | | | | LISTEN AGAIN 30 min | | | |
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'Being the first to bring challenging scientific theories to a wider audience is something Costing The Earth relishes.'
Tom Feilden
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What Lies Beneath
As the death toll from last night’s earthquake in Turkey inexorably rises, it is obvious that we are no closer to understanding where, when and why these devastating quakes strike. In tonight’s Costing The Earth Tom Feilden asks if we will ever be able to predict earthquakes and prevent loss of life on such a catastrophic scale.
For centuries our knowledge of earthquakes has progressed at a painfully slow rate. The ancient Greeks belived that tremors were caused when Poseidon struck the earth with his trident, while the Japanese notion was that earthquakes were the result of a giant cat fish thrashing its tail. Our knowledge and understanding has only really increased in the immediate aftermath of massive quakes.
Developments in technology over the last few decades have led to breakthroughs in seismology: the scientific study of earthquakes and faults, and today we’re at last on the verge of uncovering the secrets beneath our feet. A huge monitoring project is about to get underway in the United States that could potentially change the face of earth science.
America’s top geologists have got together to form Earthscope, an organisation which intends to ‘do for seismology what the human genome project did for the body’. They plan to answer all the fundamental questions of earth science, creating a living map of every movement in the earth’s plates and faults, every shift of magma in our active volcanoes. As well as employing an impressive array of satellites, strain-meters and hand-held radar they’re planning to drill right through the heart of the San Andreas Faultand install an observatory to watch every move the ground makes.
| |  | | Tom Feilden in the Earthquake Simulator at the Natural History Museum
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Advances in building engineering have accelerated at a rate of knots. The real challenge is to design buildings that can withstand the strongest of tremors, preventing death and destruction in areas most at risk.
In this week's Costing the Earth Tom Feilden meets the team behind Earthscope and asks if we will finally gain a real understanding of what’s going on beneath our feet- and learns about the advances in engineering that could potentially save thousands of lives.
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RELATED LINKS
Earthscope
United States Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Program
British Geological Survey Earthquakes Page
Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology
BBCi Nature: Environment
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