As the Earth Shakes, a Machine Below The Bronx Takes Note

[mcscajun]

As a former Bronxite who had Fordham University as a close neighbor, I hadn't thought about this place in years. Hell, I didn't even know it had been shut down for a few years and then reopened. Anyway, I thought this might be of some interest here. :)

November 20, 2006
As the Earth Shakes, a Machine Below the Bronx Takes Note
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

Last month, early on a Sunday morning, an earthquake struck the Hawaiian Islands, damaging schools, roads and businesses. It shook people awake, caused widespread power failures and jolted a machine about 5,000 miles away in The Bronx.

There, in an underground vault at Fordham University, a small steel cylinder picked up the tremor. This little device and generations of its predecessors have been recording the rumblings of the earth for nearly 100 years at the Jesuit university. Since 1910, when a chemistry instructor, the Rev. Edward P. Tivnan, installed a seismograph in the basement of the administration building, Fordham has been the site of the oldest seismic station in New York City.

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The station opened in 1924 and sits at the edge of a wide lawn in the center of campus, next to Freeman Hall, home of the department of physics. That Gothic stone building looks more like a country chapel than a seismic station.

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Jesuits, known for centuries for their interest in the natural sciences, were instrumental in the development of seismology, and Father Lynch was one in a long line of Jesuit seismologists whose faith in God infused his work. In the early 1950s, he conducted seismic tests in Rome to help the Vatican search for the tomb of St. Peter.

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Fordham’s seismometer is part of a network of similar machines that monitor earthquake activity in the northeastern United States. The network, coordinated by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, is made up of seismic stations in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Vermont. It supplies data to a larger national network, the Advanced National Seismic System, operated by the United States Geological Survey.

Much more here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/nyregion/20quake.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1164028925-lkm6sobYA5DliTfqZr9BZg&pagewanted=print