From: Cayata Dixon -------------------- Kids make scientific leap, produce minor earthquake -------------------- In an unprecedented experiment, 1 million British youngsters team up to show their energy can rival that of Mother Nature By Michael Holden Reuters September 8, 2001 LONDON -- About a million British schoolchildren succeeded in causing an earthquake Friday, jumping up and down simultaneously in the world's largest scientific experiment. Thousands of schools throughout Britain were asked to send children to the playgrounds at 11 a.m. 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," said Nigel Pain, director of Science Year. "We generated something like 1/100th of a serious earthquake," he said. "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 Pain said it was an unofficial world record. Early estimates suggested that 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," Pain said. "But drop that in one spot and it would have caused quite a big hole in the ground." Over the next two weeks, the results will be analyzed to see whether 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 2 billion joules of energy and trigger the equivalent of an earthquake measuring 3 in magnitude. The event attracted serious attention from scientists, including the Atomic Weapons Establishment, which maintains Britain's nuclear warheads. The world did not split in two, as one of the children surveyed before the event thought would happen, nor did the Earth leave the sun's orbit as feared by another. A third student came up with a more likely, if less exciting scenario: "There will be lots of hospital visits from people with sprained ankles." Copyright (c) 2001, Chicago Tribune -------------------- Subscribe to the Chicago Tribune Today! Good Eating, Your Place, and TV Week -- just a few reasons to get the Chicago Tribune at home every Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Subscribe by calling 1-800-TRIBUNE (1-800-874-2863) or online at chicagotribune.com/subscribe -- This is the CPS Science Teacher List. To unsubscribe, send a message to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For more information: <http://home.sprintmail.com/~mikelach/subscribe.html>. To search the archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/science%40lists.csi.cps.k12.il.us/>
