Abstract
AMONG the results produced by the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, must be reckoned a memory, by Prof. T. J. J. See, covering 140 pages of the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (vol. xlv., October-December, 1906), on the cause of earthquakes, mountain formation, and kindred phenomena. The explanation adopted is a development of an old-fashioned idea, and is supported by quotations from the writings of natural philosophers from Aristotle down to Charles Darwin. Earthquakes, with volcanoes and mountain ranges, are all ascribed to the explosive power of steam formed within or just beneath the heated rocks of the earth's crust, chiefly by the leakage of sea water through the ocean beds; the pressure of this steam forces the lava in a lateral direction, and its subsequent condensation leads to the subsidence of the sea bottom often observed after great earthquakes; the lava forced aside may either break out through volcanic vents or may lift the overlying rocks into mountain ranges, and, when the movement is sudden, give rise to faults and fractures which are the result, not the cause, of earthquakes.
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The Cause of Earthquakes . Nature 76, 341 (1907). https://doi.org/10.1038/076341a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/076341a0