Ever wonder what would happen if...
Have you ever wondered what would happen if everyone jumped up and down
all at the same time? Well, thanks to modern science, we now have an answer...
Friday September 7 9:55 AM ET
UK Children Cause Earthquake in Giant Jump
By Michael Holden
LONDON (Reuters) - 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.
The event has also attracted serious attention from scientists including
the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), which maintains Britain's
nuclear warheads.
Pain said: "The jump will tell us how long vibration lasts in the upper
Earth crust, whether it's over instantaneously, or if it continues for
seconds or even minutes.
"The AWE will be working on it for several weeks to come."
Fortunately the world didn't split in two as one of the children
surveyed before the event believed would happen, nor did the Earth leave
the Sun's orbit as feared by another.
A third came up with a more likely, if less exciting scenario.
"There will be lots of hospital visits from people with sprained
ankles."
