Big Quake Study Center Will Be at Menlo Park A major new National Earthquake Research Center, designed to assault the barrier that has long prevented earthquake prediction, is being established at Menlo Park by the United States Geological Survey. The Chronicle learned yesterday. It will be one of the largest centers for study of the earth sciences in the world, and will have laboratories boasting the most exotic instruments to probe the planet’s crustal faults and structures. It will be headed by a world famous geophysicist, Louis C. Pakiser Jr., who now runs the Geological Survey Center for Crustal Studies in Denver. That center, with its entire team of scientists, will shortly be moved to the new Menlo Park operation. Pakiser has long been an authority on the structure and motion of the earth’s crust. In recent years he has been a top-level scientist in "Project Vela Uniform," a government program to improve methods for detecting underground atomic explosions. By examining the speed and motion of shock waves rippling through the ground from a series of United States nuclear tests in Nevada and New Mexico, Pakiser and his scientific teams have clearly been able to map in unprecedented detail the deep structure of the crust and the upper mantle of the earth throughout Western America. Now Pakiser and a large staff of geologists are being assigned to work on two of the most important problems of all:
Disclosing formation of the new Menlo Park Center from Washington yesterday, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall noted that California above all American states faces earthquake hazards every day. And with the State’s booming population and construction in the earthquake zones, Udall said, "It is imperative that we realistically face the hazards due to such catastrophes." Dr. William T. Pecora, new chief of the Geological Survey, said yesterday the Earthquake Center would swiftly become a "dynamic generator for investigative ideas and techniques," and an outstanding laboratory for men of many scientific disciplines from many nations. FACILITIES It will include facilities for mineralogy, geology and studies of gravity, magnetic fields, rock crystals and radioactive isotopes. The Menlo Park Center will involve major expansion of the Geological Survey’s present pacific regional field office at 345 Middlefield Road there. The office, which includes scientific laboratories now, is already a headquarters for earth science in the West and has led earthquake research from Alaska to Chile. Establishment of the Menlo Park Center follows by only a few days a series of urgent recommendations to the White House for such a crash program in research. A panel of experts, convened after the devastating Alaska quake of 1964, urged a ten year, $137 million research and engineering effort aimed at learning how to predict quakes and how to minimize death and damage. San Francisco Chronicle October 8, 1965 |
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