Word: benioff
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Died. Hugo Benioff, 68, foremost U.S. seismologist who turned the art of predicting earthquakes into a science; of a heart attack; in Mendocino, Calif. After charting geological faults along the U.S. West Coast, Benioff warned in 1949 that the forces that caused the 1906 San Francisco earthquake were building toward further upheavals, a prediction borne out by the California earthquakes of 1950 and 1952. His variable-reluctance seismograph, which records tiny changes in a magnetic field, after 30 years is still standard around the world...
...Caltech's Seismological Laboratory, such researchers as Hugo Benioff and Beno Gutenberg have explored the crust and core of the earth, and found out as much as any men alive about the nature of seismic waves, earthquakes, aftershock. Physicist C.C. Lauritsen produced the first 1,000,000-volt X-ray tube, and Carl Anderson won a Nobel Prize for discovering the positron. Meanwhile, Caltech biologists have been probing their own areas of the invisible. Geneticist Alfred H. Sturtevant described the linear order of genes; Calvin B. Bridges provided proof for the chromosome theory of heredity. In determining that genes...
...says Dr. Benioff, there was a great burst of earthquakes that lasted three years.* This period produced a tall jog on Dr. Benioff's chart. Since then the jogs have been smaller. Today the earth is having continual, mild earthquake activity. This means in Dr. Benioff's theory that the strain in the crust is being released as fast as it is generated. By the same reasoning, a period of no earthquake activity ought to be followed by a proportionately violent flare...
...Benioff does not try to guess what generates the strain, but he speculates on how it is released. Great earthquakes, he says, are associated with major faults (cracks) in the crust. When the faults are locked tightly together, the strain accumulates without producing earthquakes. When the faults relax, the rocks slip and shake the earth...
What locks the faults? There is astronomical evidence, says Dr. Benioff, that the earth's radius changes slightly, for an unknown reason. When its radius is smaller than normal, the faults may be locked tightly. When the earth swells up again, even a tiny bit, the faults may loosen enough to set off earthquakes...