A Study of Recent Earthquakes

Charles Davison's A Study of Recent Earthquakes turns dramatic disasters into a working laboratory for seismology. Rather than a general textbook, it gathers major shocks from the mid-19th century to the early 1900s—Naples, Ischia, Andalusia, Charleston, the Riviera, Japan, Hereford, Inverness, and India—to show how modern investigation uncovered their causes, effects, and hidden patterns. The opening chapters define the essential vocabulary of the field, from seismic focus and epicentre to isoseismal lines, meizoseismal areas, and the difference between principal shocks, fore-shocks, after-shocks, and mere earth-sounds. Davison classifies earthquakes by origin as collapse, volcanic, or tectonic, stressing that the most powerful arise from fault movement and repeated slips along deep fractures. He then follows Robert Mallet's pioneering study of the 1857 Neapolitan earthquake, where damage maps, cracked walls, fallen monuments, and displaced structures helped locate the quake's source and reveal the vulnerability of towns built on unstable ground. The book also tests the limits of such methods, using the Riviera earthquakes and their long geological setting to show the earth as a restless landscape still being shaped by ongoing movement. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.