330 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19G0 



struck, and still others. They traveled numerous paths, some by re- 

 flections within the earth, so that their arrivals at particular points 

 made protracted and complex patterns on the recorders — patterns 

 incomprehensible to anyone but skilled seismologists, but when cor- 

 rectly interpreted very revealing indeed. In fact, they carried within 

 their complex patterns extremely good indications of the distances 

 the waves had come from their origin. 



Not many seismologists are aware immediately of a distant shock, 

 because tlie typical seismograph recorder, which photographs the 

 motions of a tiny spot of light, works in a dark chamber to make a 

 record that is developed but once a day. (The favorite news story 

 about the needle being knocked oS the record is more expressive than 

 accurate — it reflects an obsolete process of scratching a line on a 

 paper that has been blackened over a smoking lamp, a method in use 

 before seismologists learned to make electrons do their work.) Mod- 

 ern stations also use electrically driven recorders that draw the line 

 visibly with ink, sometimes even hooked up to alarm devices; how- 

 ever, such elaborate apparatus is not yet in universal use. 



In the case of the Fairweather shock, it was night in North Amer- 

 ica and most American seismologists were off duty or asleep. The 

 visible recorder in the Washington office of the Coast and Geodetic 

 Survey went into violent action at 1 :24 a.m., the first waves having 

 taken 7 minutes and 58 seconds to travel the 2,800 miles at an aver- 

 age speed of almost 6 miles a second, but it worked unobserved for 

 no one was there. Nor were witnesses present at other leading ob- 

 serv^atories — Weston College, Harvard, Fordham, Columbia, St. Louis 

 University, and many others. But the quake did not lack notice. 

 Hardly had the groundwaves arrived when the Survey's observei-s 

 at Tucson, Sitka, and Honolulu, in concert with cooperating seis- 

 mologists on the Berkeley campus of the University of California 

 and at Caltech's Seismological Laboratoiy in Pasadena, were rushing 

 to their visible recorders to see what had set their bedroom alarms to 

 ringing. Together they constituted a ready force for warning action 

 in the face of a possible Pacific tidal wave, generated by the rising 

 or sinking of an extensive segment of the ocean floor in an earthquake. 

 This dramatic and often disastrous event, technically a seismic sea 

 wave, is known more conveniently by the Japanese term "tsunami," 

 the literal meaning of which is "waA^e-in-a-bay." Lituya's wave of 

 1959 was therefore a true tsunami, and, as it turned out, not a seismic 

 sea wave. 



As is the way with seismologists the world around, a widespread 

 exchange of station reports and interpretations had begun by morn- 

 ing. In the coordination and analysis center of the Coast and Geo- 

 detic Survey, plotting of the distance readings indicated where the 



