A Cool School Thing
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Well, here's an interesting article about British schoolkids. Homeschoolers
probab;ly couldn't pull this off because there probably aren't enough of
us--and more importantly, we could never agree on the logistics. ;)
Kathryn
Children Cause Earthquake in Giant Jump
By Michael Holden
Reuters
LONDON (Sept. 6) - Around a million British school children succeeded in
causing an earthquake Friday, 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. local time to jump up and down for a minute in hopes
of creating a measurable quake.
Organizers 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 tons 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 analyzed
to see if the event registered on the Richter scale.
Scientists said a million children with an average weight of 110 pounds
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.''
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
probab;ly couldn't pull this off because there probably aren't enough of
us--and more importantly, we could never agree on the logistics. ;)
Kathryn
Children Cause Earthquake in Giant Jump
By Michael Holden
Reuters
LONDON (Sept. 6) - Around a million British school children succeeded in
causing an earthquake Friday, 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. local time to jump up and down for a minute in hopes
of creating a measurable quake.
Organizers 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 tons 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 analyzed
to see if the event registered on the Richter scale.
Scientists said a million children with an average weight of 110 pounds
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.''
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]