Theos-Talk Archives (September 2001 Message tt00071)

UK Children Cause Earthquake in Giant Jump 

Around one million British school children succeeded in causing an earthquake 
on 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. (6:00 a.m. EDT) to jump up and down for a minute in 
the hope 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.