This afternoon. We're pleased to have Professor Ian Stewart here. He's a professor of communications at the University in the School of Geography, Earth and the environment. And the bigger research interests are here seismology, earthquake, geology, geo hazards and how geological change interacts with humans and the human response to this. You may I know he's also a member of the UNESCO's scientific panel.
But what you probably do know is he's a BBC presenter for programs such as the Climate Wars, Earth, Power on the Planet and his current series, Man of Rock. Last week you covered moving mountains, and this evening at 9 p.m., that's part of the Big Three. So welcome here to Oxford. Thank you very much. Confused into the hallowed territory of geography on telly with Nick Marathon stuff. We proceeded with at least five years, but it's fantastic to to come along here.
And the remit that I had a brief, if you like, was to talk a little bit about the the research but also the television work. And I've thought a lot about it and and I hope to do that and to make a general point really all the way through, which is this idea of of how we communicate and what we should communicate. So I've called this because I didn't give Trai a title.
I think even even this morning when I phoned, they still hadn't got a title, but it's called a three act structure and it kind of alludes to a view within television documentary making in general, which was very strong, especially five years ago. And it's less it's kind of moved on a little bit. The old self, those who knew the traditional Horizon style, which was a story, has a three act structure.
It's something that goes back to myth. Most of the BBC science producers, certainly a few years ago, used to go off in a Hollywood script writing course where they would be told there are only a handful of ways of telling a story. And if you want to tell a story, you need to follow those conventions. Or if you're going to break those conventions, you need to understand your breaking conventions. And that means that's fine for for fiction and doing a Hollywood blockbuster.
But the interesting thing then is how you take that and apply it to the science documentary and then in some ways to science telling science stories generally. And the three act structure works in a way that the Forsyth sets up a problem like dilemma story. The question that it could be the big mystery that so that's never been known. And then you introduce your characters who are going to to feature in this.
And then the second act really is the journey that those characters take, the way they move through, engaging with the story, engaging with the challenges they overcome, various challenges. And, and at the end of the second act, they come to what looks like a resolution. They've discovered something. But at the end of the second date in Horizon, that used to be 36 minutes, and there was a twist.
And suddenly everything you'd just be following for the last 36 minutes with thrown around and you thought, what's going on? And then the last 20 minutes would be a rollicking story to try to come to the solution and everything would be tied up at the end. So in some ways, you know, for the scientists, the scientist, it's the old kind of mind, you know, boy, let's get old boy chases, get old boy finally gets girl go leaves.
Boy, boy has to do again. Boy, you've got to finally get together again at the end, end of story. And how do you do that for a science documentary? Because what is interesting is when you can do it, when it does work, it's fantastically powerful. But there are casualties, which is that science doesn't naturally fall into those modes of of communication. So this is and we just to explain the allusion here to this three act structure.
And so I'm going to take this through my so my interest as background is hazards. I did geography, geology, degree, geography, geology study, looking at earthquake faults in the Aegean region, Greece and Turkey. And and really that followed into an interest in seismic hazard and an interest in its relationship to people in particularly the Mediterranean region.
So number one, the first point is that the problem is that often when we're confronted with a public that wants to hear about and I'm going to call this geoscience, I don't care if it's geography or geology, I'll have that discussion later on. It's kind of a balance that I want to me. But but the public meets geoscience, often in times of real crisis. So suddenly everyone's interested in a particular thing because it's there in front of them.
This is obviously what obviously. But it's Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans. And it's an interesting one because that was an event, that Category four storm hitting New Orleans was an event that was forecast and predicted in a sense that it's forecast. You know, even five years before, there were articles in the popular press like Scientific American saying the the the wetlands, the levees are the whole area is sinking. The levees aren't able to cope with a Category four storm.
You know, if we get a direct hit, the levees are going to fail. It was for a predicted in the sense of the storm. Track of that storm was known for days before. It was very clear that it was going to hit New Orleans and yet it hit New Orleans. The levees broke. That was no surprise and actually downgraded as it went on. I actually head just as a Category three, but still the levees broke. But what was absolutely stunning was just the complete meltdown of a city of.
World city in a country with FEMA. That's some of the best hazard regulations in the world. It's almost the gold standard. So how did this happen? And the irony here is that there was enough geoscience information to tell the public, to tell decision makers that that was on the cards. And yet for everyone else, apart from geosciences, it was stand up and say, well, we told you so.
It seems a huge surprise. So I'm going to explore this in the first part and really through my experience and because I did geography, geology, because I didn't like human geography. And it was just well, it was just to this point in 2005, December 2005, and I realised what a terrible mistake I'd made. So I'm kind of I don't know what I am, though. This is like a cheetah, which is just north of Los Angeles is Santa Barbara.
And it's it's the site of a mudslide. Landslide mudslides can see the back scar up the top there. And you can also see the you can see the Mons where the mudslide was. And this is a commemoration to the ten people who who died here. And as I said, in January 2005, there was a big heavy rainstorm, saturated the slopes. And this previous landslide scar just really mobilising came sweeping down. I'm trying to work a mike with us with the notes, but pointless. Right.
So in the. We went there because obviously Coach John is into the Ring of fire and we met with Gina. And Gina story really was very dramatic because Gina there's the you can see the mudslide re mobilise mudslide down here and this was the house that was destroyed. And this is Gina's house just there. She was directly across the street.
In fact, the story she tells is of Charlie, her best friend, who was in the house across the road, who had actually moved into the caravan that you saw to let the watch the wallet. Family, who was a family that had lost their house, were staying there.
And she tells a story of the the father of the family who'd been down to the petrol station, just off the picture here, walking up the street and seen basically the mountain coming down and covering the house with these with his wife and kids and with Charlie and his dog. And it happened just a few months before. So it was very raw for for Gina. And the funny thing for me was we walked up the street and we talked about this and we saw this house just tucked under here and it was for sale.
And I remember saying, well, there's no way someone is going to buy that house. You open the curtains and those crosses of the prayer, they find the bodies directly across in every geoscience report that's been done on that mudslide. And there's been several by the USGS. I said the same thing. The next high precipitation event that happens will somehow re mobilise that slope and that landslide complex will move again. It's not rocket science. And she said, Oh, that's been sold.
And actually, she said, it's actually gone up in value since the landslide. So in after the landslide, the values went down and then they picked up again and they were no higher than the weather before. She also told us, she said a month after the landslide, I got informed by my insurance company that my insurance for this house here was no longer valid. I then got told several weeks after that that actually it was valid, but come renew it would not be renewed.
She said this was us in December, she said. Last week I received my forms for renew so the insurance company aren't bothered about asylum. Gina has read every science report there is to read about, as you would. She's intelligent. She's affluent. In other words, she can move.
She won't. She's not moving. And I look at that and I think, you know, I, I mean, I don't study landslides, but if I was studying landslide, I don't think there's a single thing I could study about that landslide that would make Gina. And she's not alone and her neighbours move. There's something else there that's underlying it. And that's when I realised in some ways that that physical side of the, the houses that I've been doing was a little bit impotent, as I'd always been thinking.
The more information we got, the more people would just respond to it. And clearly that's not happened. So another story. This is Mount Merapi. I did a program again. It was a journey into the ring of fire and we went to Merapi. So really evil. It was there on what? It's very dangerous volcano every few years that eruption.
And that's the way it has a congealed top to it, which then tends to kind of fall off fragment and produce these pyroclastic flows that go down the mountain and regularly kill every decade or so, sometimes more. And we went up the top there, and we were looking at the the monitoring system. And it's one of the best monitored volcanoes in Indonesia. And really here, as we were coming down the mountain, he told me a story off camera that just astounded me.
And really story was he says, of course we do this monitoring. We detect the seismicity and the inflation of the volcano. And we we tell the government and they do a mandatory evacuation system. And people are told to leave. And, of course, some of the villages don't leave. And I said, what do you mean? Some of the villages told me, that's that's crazy. And they said, Oh, no, they don't leave many of the times they stay.
And on as we explore this further and this is the evidence for really this was a village of Turco, which is in the flanks of Merapi, and this was a place where during a mandatory evacuation, there's a volcanic crisis going on. The people were told to evacuate. They have a wedding in this church hall. Pyroclastic flow came through and 40 people died in this place.
And the arguments at the time were that the reason that people were leaving was because that they've got a spiritual connection to the volcano. And particularly this chap here, Marjan, is the spiritual gatekeeper of of Merapi and lives in a village called Pelham Sodom. And basically his responsibility is to commune with the volcano. And through a number of devices, he communicates with the volcano.
And the story that was going around beforehand was the reason they were evacuating was because the volcano and this is the place where their ancestors go. This is important. The lot of people go into the volcano. The reason they weren't leaving was because of they've and made it clear to him in various ways it wasn't going to erupt and harm them.
The reason these people died, they said, was because they'd actually held a wedding in the wrong day, not because they had not left the the evacuation zone. And I just thought this was madness. I thought, this is crazy. Volcanics predicted sites much better than to do with earthquakes. It's really good. And yet to have a situation where we can get it so good. And yet communities were not doing it because of some kind of sort of belief system, seemed to me at the time.
Extraordinary. So when I came back, we applied with human geographer James City way up to to us neck studentship. We got this subject. She's not here so I can borrow some of Donovan to do. This is now Oxford and Kate spent several years living up in Pelham Soddy and some of the other villages talking to the villagers about why they didn't leave. And what was interesting was there is that element of that spiritual connection to Merapi.
That's absolutely the case. But a lot of people say you're not mad about it, and it's a bit odd. We don't really follow. The real reason they don't do it is very, very simple. And that most of the most of the livelihood for this upper flanks of the volcano is from collecting grass, feeding grass to their cow, usually one family cow collecting the milk and selling the milk. So people quite rightly said, well, if I evacuate, that's fine, I can buy the family. What about my cow? If I lose that cow?
I am very family is late with this stuff. In other words, they're making a rational decision that their chances of survival are better if they stay in the village than if they leave. And actually, if you think about it, they're probably right. The thing is, last year Merapi erupted again and this eruption claimed 230 lives. And the pyroclastic flows went straight through Palam City and killed more bodies.
And many of the people that I was interviewing. So this is a it's a first the impact that people make that is quite dangerous. In other words, there is this element of people having a belief system, but at the same time, it does kind of clash with what our understanding is. And I think one of the ways interest way is to what extent can we communicate what we know to people who have a very different belief system and a way of understanding?
One of the things that we had this fantastic idea and we haven't followed up and I still think it's the best idea that she had in the whole thing was most people in Indonesia get there and get their information on anything through shadow puppetry. So the idea was to create a volcanic hazard shadow puppet show and take it into villages and demonstrate it that way. Probably far more effective than any of the research papers that get kind of written.
For me, the the other place that really brought it home was after the Indian Ocean tsunami. And we went out to make a horizon in Thailand. And the key thing that brought it home was this idea of the clash of cultures really that you get in these places. So if you look at a top left here, this is out of an island which were devastated just off of Thailand. This is 100 years ago.
And what we see is a people with houses on stilts using traditional materials, a people that know very well that the this the sea is dangerous. It can change. It can flood and fight. In similarly island, which was very near the epicentre of the earthquake. But further south, they've had about 100 years. But no, but 80 years before they've had a tsunami, a smaller earthquake and tsunami, and a similar to this time in 2004.
Of the 70,000 people that lived on the island, despite being in the main area, the shaking and the biggest waves. Seven people died and they died. I mean, they didn't die. Vidyarthi, because one thing, just when they felt the earth shake, they run upslope. So this idea of communities that have maintained some kind of connection and oral history and story telling have actually managed to pass on information about the cultural context of hazard.
This is a famous photograph of the German family cow, like where the mother is running out to all the family as the frost waves come in and they all survive. But this is this family and indeed, all of the you know, the people that go there from, you know, this is Sweden's highest death toll, Indian Ocean. This is a an event that is very different from your typical hazard for those people. Their hazard scape is not of tsunamis. They come from Germany.
And yet we know within hours can take a cell from one place, one hazard scapes, another one without any idea of what we're getting into. And the thing is, this is what meets the wave when it comes in. That's what makes it 100 years ago. That's what gets the know the. One of the chaps who survived that we interviewed. I was chatting to him afterwards and he said, you know, the thing is, he was a surfer.
They said, the thing is, you think you know what tsunami is? It's a wall of water coming at you really fast, turbulent. Wow. It says. But along the front of Khao Lak, you have lots of shacks, concrete shacks selling soft drinks, ice cream, etc., to the two of us on the beach. It says, What you go to imagine is are a wall of concrete and fridges coming at you.
And that's the difference. That's a difference in 100 years is what we've we've changed the nature of the vulnerability to change the nature of the hazard through the vulnerability by what we've done. And. The interesting thing that is. The funny thing about it from a my perspective, immediate perspective was the thing within BBC One called the Tsunami and Anatomy of a Disaster.
And I didn't feature. And the Friday before time, they told us that the two scientists want to go to strike and I had gone to Thailand would drop we were on the cutting room floor because the testimony of people who'd actually experienced this just was hugely more powerful than the science of standing there saying what tsunami was.
And that's an interesting one that I'll come back to, which is that people listening to people who have actually got something firsthand to say about something that is intensely amazing, rather than someone who just turns up and tells you what it is. But here's the thing. This is my photograph from one of the rich, the big hotels, the plush hotels, and this is the thought department back there was one of one.
They had another one there. And this wall here only really survived because it's facing in the direction the waves came in. But when I was there, there was a lot of talk about, oh, we're going to learn from this and we're going to rebuild in different places. We talked to the tell that he's rebuilt in there and is rebuilding there for two reasons. One is because that's what his line does, is we bought the locals live a kilometre in line. Is also good because you guys, we want to live.
We want to live 50 yards from the beach. We don't want to live 500 metres from the beach or five kilometres from beach. We want to live at the beach. So the nature of it's this realisation that this tsunami, the physical property of the tsunami that kicked in 100 years ago in this area is probably very similar to what kicked in. It's not as big, but similar to what were kicked in 2004. But the what it meant in terms of the human environment was completely different.
And that's what I mean about this realisation in my head that suddenly the physical was the easy part. And actually, you know, we think of hazards and physical processes of frickin was working tsunamis and although this is really complicated is but it's absolutely nothing compared to the social science dimension of of what you do. And various programs. Come back to us later. I've talked about the situation here in Istanbul. Now. Istanbul is waiting for a big earthquake.
The earthquake fault line that runs along the northern Turkey has unzipped its almost entire length in the last 60 years, apart from a 120 to 30 kilometre section just south of Istanbul. If that doesn't go in the next few decades, we've completely misunderstood earthquakes, which of course is possible, but it's getting unlikely. More likely is that in your lifetime you will see Istanbul destroyed.
Now, the thing is, to what extent do we continue to study the geological aspects and all the rest of it? Rather than put no say they said, look, that city is going to be destroyed. What are we going to do about it? That is a city of 11 million people that we now know is waiting for the big one. That's where our earthquake science has taken is the harder it is what we actually do about it.
And that's where I'm going to be, you know, thinking about the communication, how do we get this message across? Because it's a message that isn't getting across. And yet it's actually incredibly simple. I'm not demeaning you. I could do this lecture to a bunch of six year olds and they would understand the problem.
It's here. So I think one of the issues that we've got really is that on the one hand, poor and effective communication is kind of holding back the application of all this huge amounts of geoscience knowledge. We've built up fantastic language, but we can't seem to get it out there. I also think that they are too long to go into this talk.
But there are systemic barriers within the academic community and within the science community actually, and kind of prevent us or hindrance inhibitors from getting that out and they need to be overcome. But the bottom line, really, and if you only have one take home message, the whole thing is that I think we need to be doing its geoscience as it should be doing it. It's not trying to get journalists to be trained in quick science of volcanic volcano science or whatever your topic is.
It's us. Understand how we communicate and learn and some of the tricks that that they've got another communicators have got. So that really brings us back to really which is the journey. How do we go from knowing tons of stuff about something to actually been able to talk to other people about it? People ask about Cruise, I just pass that because this is a typical size. This is Brian Fisher getting interviewed. He's antman someone who knows more about communication than anyone else.
He studies the ants in here is in Madagascar as a can of mode to look at by a conservation. Diverse biodiversity richness in forests and he's fantastic at getting the message across. But that's a typical crew. It's three, maybe one other. The researcher and myself going around. So here's the question and you. What I invite you to do the next few minutes is to think about it. Whatever area of geography you are into, to think about this, what is it that people need to know?
Because that's going to predetermine everything, really. And there's various ways of thinking what need to know. One of them is the idea of the information deficiency module model, which says the poor are general public. They don't know anything. Their minds are vacuum. There's nothing in there in terms of science information.
What we should do is fill that vacuum. So we've got our decisive mission, which is filling that top in them up with lots and lots of information because they need to know this stuff is good for them to know. They should know. They should know what you're doing. I, general, probably understand science is better able to comment on scientific issues.
It's be able to hold politicians responsible for making the scientific decisions they make, etc. So let me just give you an example, maybe a shocking example. This was a National Science Foundation survey done about ten years ago. So. In the States and they asked the for and American adults and asked them about basic science. And I'm going to ask you so you can put hands up here. This is the they're all or false. So the centre of the earth is very hot. True or false?
Hands up, please. True. So who thinks that's true? Okay. Oxygen we breathe comes from plants. Who thinks that's true? Well, if people are less hesitant. Electrons are smaller than atoms over people more confident in the continents in which we live. Have been moving the location for millions of years. Will continue to move in the future. Oh, my goodness. Okay, I'll give you something else, because it's human beings as we know them today. Oh, no. From earlier species of animals such as this one.
Many agree. True. The earliest human beings lived at the same time as the dinosaurs. True. Well, I'm going to give you the results. So essentially, it's very hot. 78% of American adults said this, which means 22% didn't think it was very or didn't know. So that's nearly a quarter of American adults weren't sure that the centre of the earth was hot. And look at, for example, number six, at least humans lived the same size dinosaurs.
48% thought that was. So that means the more than half actually thought. 48% thought it was false. So 52% thought that was true. More than half Americans thought the dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time. Now we can giggle at this. I wouldn't be doing a gig with a foster masseur. But if you look at the surveys, the American public is actually better at science than we are. They visit science museums more. They watch science programs more. They read science things more.
So the question that is in Europe, for example, in Britain, what would happen if you went into Oxford, means, well, maybe in Oxford you'd hope you'd maybe a few academics, but well, if you went into the mainstream of a typical city and asked those questions. I'm not sure you would get a much of a different one, but it's a suggestion. And one of the reasons I think is that this is what science is.
This diagram tries to look at the topology of science for interesting geographies here between classical studies, nutrition and human geography. But if you imagine if you imagine talking to one of us, so just thinking talking to your parents about geography and what their their understanding of geography is, it's transformed completely. I know from the geology side that even go back 20 years when I did my degree, but certainly 50 years to some degree is absolutely transform.
The edge of my field is now astronomically far away from where the centre was 50 years ago. And if you imagine that all those sciences are pushing ahead with their frontier, it means that science is a fantastic place. But you imagine the per person who's done a little bit of science at school and is now trying to follow some of the issues to do with stem cell research or nuclear fusion or GM or anything to do with their kind of environmental field.
So I think the point is that if there's a dilution in science, it's because science itself has become so incredibly complicated. So there's another way of looking at this to say, look, this is the way we do it. It's dead complicated science. So what we're doing and make it simple, we'll just mainly talk to them about the important things called the rational choice model, things that people can expect to make a rational choice. But that's what we concentrate on.
We'll just focus on communicating back packages of information. For example, one thing we might all agree on here that's important for people to know is climate change. So you might say, right, we should tell people about climate change. But that does beg a question, which is, well, what do we tell them? Because that assumes that there's a body of agreed knowledge that we can just tell them. And clearly an example with climate change is that there is a contested body even within science.
Now it depends what level you decide to take. Your contested, the vast majority, 98% of climate science, probably 90 is more than that, 90%. Climate scientists have no problem with it. But it's definite that down the food chain of the scientists, those first kind of issues and there's lots of places where there's big disagreement that, for example, is water going down, a system on top of the Greenland ice sheet.
And one of the big arguments is where's the fresh water going? Is it going down straight to the base? Then, is moulins to lubricate the base of the ice sheet because it's moving? We know the ice sheets are moving faster. And and the idea is that the very likelihood is that we don't really understand ice sheets. They're going to be moving and melting much faster than we've previously thought.
Other people say that's not rubbish, that actually what's happening is that you've got much warmer sea temperatures, the ice sheets are calving faster and that's allowing the ice to move behind. It's got nothing to do with water. So the point is there is no one level in science that is no consensus. And some people would go further and say there shouldn't be consensus. Science is about disagreement.
It's about challenging, but questioning. But I have to say, I think the public will find that very luxurious of us to just be able to sit and question all the time when actually they're trying to make decisions. They want to know what to do. And of course, the irony is we all deal with consensus. Whenever you go into a lecture, a lecture with the member of staff, it teaches them, they tell you consensus. They tell you the framework of understanding of that particular topic.
At that time. You get given textbooks, which are consensus. So we do deal with consensus trying to wrap it up. But the problem is when we get into the public domain, we find this very tricky to say things that are absolute consensus and as a community to be a consensus.
So this means this idea of a rational mode is quite difficult because there is no agreed set of information from scientists, from geographers say say from climate science community as to what to give people to tell them about climate change. So that's another way of looking at it, and this is the way that I look at it. And that is to say, what do people need to know? And the thing is, well, why don't you ask them? Because the other way to the case is that they want to know.
Maybe that's the way that maybe that's our way to think about it. So there's Oxford High Street. Those people are busy running around their daily lives. What is it they're interested in? What is it they think they either need to know or would like to do? If you go and ask them, generally in the UK you find that this is a survey of attitudes towards public attitudes, towards energy, environment. So that's what's the most important issues in the top left there.
So this is what people on average are thinking about. And environment is too bad. It's in the top ten. So it beats taxes, but it's not quite as important as the ageing population. But it's asylum seekers, terrorism and crime that kind of wins out. But luckily enough, a stock market, for example, is it's not very well thought of within environmental concerns. Here are the areas which are mainly worried about global warming.
Big, big amount on global warming. So the point is that there are things and that's the point is not to actually move up and down on a daily basis. In other words, things that are in the news take it up. And if there's lots of other things going on. Something about the stock market, for example, of AIDS or abortion, then these things drop down. And the point is that because people are kind of interested in these things, if you work in those things and if there's an event.
Or a newsworthy piece. Then people will be interested in finding out about it. And that is the window of opportunity for you to get across whatever key point, one or two key points you want to put across. But that's only a very narrow set of areas. What about other things? Because there's probably lots of people in this audience looking at things. I've got nothing to do with that. For example, for my thing, earthquakes doesn't really appear to the UK public to be some of the bolivar.
So that's the role of the media shaping, designing people's attitudes. And this is from Steve Sparks is one of the probably the top volcanologists in Britain heavily involved in volcanic hazard. And he you know, he says, look, the media are really useful. They have a fantastic potential role to play. I'm talking about how to persuade politicians to act and communities to take notice of scientific information.
But then he said, But the problem is all this sensationalist stuff, they really want to be sensationalist. They're all interested in death and destruction. When I first started doing television, it was a mega tsunami and it was a super volcano. Krakatau According to YouPorn, it was kind of like the planet can kill you in a thousand different ways. Always said to me, I've done a little bit of promoting, but I always thought ultimately it was a rather boring way to do it.
And Steve is someone who has been quite critical of of the media in this regard. But I think Steve's missing the point actually here, and that is because it's fake. It presupposes that the media, his job is to provide scientific information to the general public. And that's not the media's job. The media's job as a print journalist is to sell newspapers. And if it's a television channel, a television program is to get people to watch the television programme.
And I think Ted nailed the job. So it was a PR plus. The journalists got it right. This is by always bearing in mind two crucial facts that the news media are not going to change the way they walk to please scientists and that they should be approached as a branch of the entertainment industry. All subsequent decisions and behaviours and part of the scientists and the companies institutions will be more likely to be based with success.
In other words, if you accept that the media is about entertaining, it's about engaging, it's about providing almost a distraction to normal life, then you're actually going to have a much easier time getting your thing across.
The tricky thing is it presupposes that it requires you to make your message entertaining and engaging and all the things that the media are looking for and that for many people might be very uncomfortable about the nature of the research to dealing with they may feel it, trivialises it, etc. But here's the thing for me. This is from the National Science Foundation Review, which is online in both the United States and Europe.
Most adults find out at least the science and technology develops from watching television. The print media rank a distant second. The Internet, although not the main source of news for most people, become the main place to get information about specific science and technology subjects. It's 2004. I suspect the Internet has grown even more to be the place where people go to if they want some specific information.
But I would argue that television remains the place where people get grounded in the culture of science, really about the breadth of science. So if you're interested in one thing and you're going to Wikipedia, you type, and that'll take you to a place and that might give you a kind of instant fix of information. The irony is what they've found is that if people are really interested in scientific issue, what they tend to do is then go to more specialist books.
There's been a huge rise in science books over the last 20 years. But nevertheless, television is the place where the public perception of science and our case geoscience is made. And so what I want to argue, really, is that it's this thing of context. What popular science does is it provides a context. It provides a mental framework for for a viewer to be able to learn about new things.
So they've got this framework so that when they suddenly find someone telling them about desertification in the Gobi, for example, they can place it somewhere because they didn't know about desertification before and know they had something roughly a bit desertification. They know it's a problem. They know it's a kind of problem in Asia. Okay, that fits now with it. Not if you don't have that template. There's no place to put these things.
So to my mind, what you what we're going to have to have is a situation where we've got different tiers of approaches and one of them is a kind of a base level, is providing information at a kind of popular mass level, which is this setting up context. So that's the second act, really, which is to say that what we should be doing isn't communicating at all. It's entertaining. We should be go looking into the subjects, our interests, what we're doing.
And whenever we get that public face, be thinking, What is it I do? What is it? But my, you know, in my area that I'm working in. That's interesting. What are the stories I can tell? That's what I that's what we should be doing. So with that in mind, I'm going to kind of the third act really in terms of the solution is very arrogant. It's only because of the relaxed structure, really. But I'm going to just talk about my research and how that relates to this idea.
And it's this this idea of making use of a good story. So what I'm interested increasingly in and is what's called earthquake archaeology, we've conducted archaeology, which is the connection between the earthquakes recorded in the archaeological record archaeological past, for example, these dislocated or column drums in a Greek temple and which are which are thought to be generated by earthquakes.
And that's the Sichuan earthquake in China, which is, in other words, seismic hazard can by looking into the archaeological record, we get things about the recurrence of earthquakes, about frequency of damage, but where they occur, that'll tell us about future ones. Now some people are very sceptical. This is Charles Richter. He of the Richter Scale says ancient accounts of earthquakes don't help as much. They're incomplete. An accuracy is usually sacrificed to make the most of a good story.
I think most seismologists today would still argue with that tells a seismic hazard. In fact, I agree with this. I don't think it's going to. So ways of arguing against the whole set of things, I'll see later. But I don't think intrinsically studying earthquakes in archaeological record will actually advance seismic hazard. But bear with me, because I think there is something interesting here. So let's go let's see a bit of this. Okay. So this is a useful me. This was the and I so what?
I finished a study in 1990. Working on these earthquake faults is a striated fault sophistry. So you've got bets going up in there that the land has gone down very suddenly in a series of kind of jumps. I studied in Greece and one of the after I've finished my pitch, they started working in university in London. I studied this place in central Greece in this particular fall.
So I spent a good few years studying this, this particular fault, and it ended up being a story that close to this this fault, last move, we think we don't know what it moved, but it moved, we think, in an earthquake in 373 B.C., which destroyed the local city of Halki. It was leaky, really. As I started my work there, an archaeological site had started. They were looking for help.
And the reason I say looking for it becomes clear in the next one, because L'Aquila is a fantastic earthquake, the accounts of it are extraordinary. This is a later by Roman writer, but there's lots of accounts of the time. The sea flooded in far over the land and overwhelmed the city and its surroundings and the swell of the sea. So covered the sacred grove of Poseidon. Nothing could be seen but the tops of the trees.
A sudden tremor was sent by the God, and with the earthquake, the sea run back dragging down, leaking into the receding waters with every living person. The main story was that the when people went the next day to find a leaky, which was the capital city of the region, they couldn't find any evidence of it. So this was this event happened in roughly the time when Plato was writing Tanis and Criccieth, which is the place where he describes this account of Atlantis.
And so one of the arguments that I'd written, I think it was a he said, look, if you're going to have Atlantis as anything real, then surely one of the things it's got to be is this event, huge, colossal event in Plato's lifetime, which has got many of the hallmarks of of Atlantis. And that was a theme that got picked up and that became the horizon. And it was a huge and it's a fantastic there was a great story. Now just to bring you to some geology here, really.
Golf, of course. This is the canal. Athens is over here and Ali Velshi is somewhere in there. I won't go into the story. It's a fantastic story, actually, in terms of, Jim, what the answer turns out to be. Come from Coastal Geomorphology, actually, but I've got to leave that. So that was the area that was we think it was affected. That's a follow up study the other day that it was affected, that the same earthquake was across the Gulf there and Delphi.
So what I like this to jump across to Delphi, that Delphi is an amazing place.
It's in the classical world. This was the main centrepiece of of the the classical Greek world is a place that held the famous Delphic Oracle, one of the great oracles, arguably the greatest oracle of the ancient world, such that, for example, King Cruises, King of Lydia, when he wanted to make a momentous decision, he rode tested three or four different oracles about a particular question, and Delphi was the most reliable.
So he went to Delphi with his big one and he said, Should I invade Persia and cruises? What happens is, is that there's a the idea is this is tested by people at the time working in a temple. Is that just under here? There's a subterranean chamber and a priestess. It was originally a young virgin. And then something happened, something really event happened that we don't quite know about. She became a lady of good repute, an elderly lady of good repute.
I don't think it was the same woman, but the point was that the obvious to say that young virgin is reliable enough and that it was much easier. So this priestess would sit on a can, a tripod inhale intoxicating vapours, committing a chasm in the rock. Go into mandrake trance and make some kind of prophecy which would be interpreted by the male priests around. So when Crosby is asked this question, the answer came back. If you invade Persia, you will destroy a great empire. So cross beauty.
And he went and he was destroyed. And his great empire was destroyed with them. So there was always that little bit of ambiguity there. But here it is. And the interesting thing was this idea of a chasm. French workers had archaeologists that excavated for a century never found anything like a chasm. So they started to think that these descriptions of but from a time weren't correct.
But then a few years ago, a geologist published a paper in geology actually saying that they thought there probably was something that. And that's because there's a whole series of earthquake fault lines that more or less define. If you drive into Delphi from the from the east side, you actually go on the road. And this is the fault surface. The fault plane has come down. It's all adorned various things. But that's the the actual fault plane.
You come around the corner and it kind of winds its way up the slope. And Delphi is located here. So there's kind of two strands of it. But the point is that if you look at the locations of spring lanes within the Delphi site, it's been argued by several people over the years that that was probably because there were two lanes of fault lines, very small fault lines, nothing major, but just accommodating some of the dislocation.
And one of them is argued to go right through the Temple of Apollo, which is where you saw the housing the Delphi. Correct. And indeed, this is a suggestion then that this is the temple. So the oracular chamber will be down here. And the idea is that as a fault system comes down through here as a series of springs. And this isn't published this. But but there is very clear evidence that there's been movement on this because you can see it.
You can see the temple right at the vault. Gates essentially comes in beautifully straight. There's a kink at the straight. So that bit overhead is moving to your left. As you look at it in this book, he is moving to the right and it's a little bit of slip. It's not a huge chasm. It's just an earthquake fault.
And there can be very odd mishandling. So this is an instance when we have a situation where a fault line is possibly been influencing in some manner some of the great decisions of the ancient world. I want to jump on a little bit, because that's that stuff's all published and kind of out there, really. But up in the last few years, with interest in a number of sites around the eastern Mediterranean that have fault lines associated with ancient sites, sometimes very intimately.
And this is an intriguing one. So I'll use this to kind of make the bigger point. This is committees and committees was the kind of Milton Keynes of its day. I know it's not that great. The point was, it's a new town. It was deliberately built and it was the first to have the kind of the normal grid style can a pattern. And it was placed deliberately, rather oddly, in this completely dry end of the dacha peninsula in southwestern Turkey.
And on that, there's a big fault line which comes up here in this graph and it comes across and I'm going to talk about this, but I'm going to talk about that. But it's hard to see on here, but essentially the fault is coming up here. Oh, you never believe this. It's just such a degree of let me point out. So the first bit I want to take it is a love temple, which is fantastic because it was it was excavated by Professor Cornelia Love from Cornell University.
And the temple is a Roman temple dedicated to Aphrodite. It doesn't get any better. Like, can you imagine, right in the research proposal, you're just going to say yes, go. No one else can study that. So there is an in love in 1970 describes very accurately describes this temple. What's amazing is that crack runs right the way through it completely bisects it beautifully. Now, the thing about this temple is that is isn't the most recent one.
The temple was built in the classical time, then it was destroyed. It was rebuilt in Roman times or Hellenistic times. Actually, it was then destroyed again. And in late Roman times it was put together, but it was never really a functioning temple. So there's at least two instances where it was broken and rebuilt. Now, the interesting thing from a geological point of view is this is a terrible photograph.
This Bush a wizard. This is a nice, smooth folk plate here of the type you've seen before, but it can get round far enough. And the point is it continues and it basically bisects the temple so that this side of the temples cut into bedrock. And that said, you can see the alluvial felt of a series of kind of terraces. So that's interesting. I remember thinking, God, that was bad luck, wasn't it?
I mean, they they built around a fall and then then they got broken and they built again right on a fall. They took me I was a flight home when I was gone. That's just plain odd that they must have built deliberately on a fault. It's very hard to think. So then you start to think, why on earth would they do that? Before I get into musing on that, I'm going to skip onto the other of a site. This is the other sanctuary. The main sanctuary. Can you just sanctuary of Demeter?
But you can see it. This is the fault plane. The surface is the fault plane. These are little niches carved into the rock, which led to Charles Newton, who's set out by the British Museum in the late 1800s to kind of borrow bits, things for the British Museum to suppose that there was going to be a great temple under here. And he thought it was a sanctuary, some damage for various things, and damage was a kind of underworld affinity deity.
So he put some gelignite and whatever, blasted a big hole and what end? And he argued that although he had no idea this was a fault point, he called it a scalp. He found evidence of a quake or a discrete, violent convulsion of nature and argued that an earthquake displaced things. So. Here's the intriguing thing. Normally, I've got a whole series of different sites, what I argued as we come to this point. But here's the thing is if you.
Well, there are several reasons why I think that are earthquake fault lines that are important. One of the most obvious ones is because fault lines are pathways for water. So most of the spring lines in the Mediterranean that cast the Mediterranean environment are channelled along faults. They're the conduits of the subsurface and the springs emerge along fault lines and in areas of social reform. So if you are having any kind of settled ancient world, you need a persistent spring line.
And especially in Greek times, when water has an incredible, important, therapeutic and ritualistic significance. So you basically want good water supply. And actually a funny enough fault lines give you that. But imagine if you've got a water supply that also has got some funny stuff going on. So you've got either hot spring water that makes it kind of special or even better. Hot spring water. With vapours coming out, it becomes an even more special place.
As a place you put a set settlement it. So there's a lots of reasons why you may well want to build your your town right beside no fault line, even though, of course, you don't know it's an earthquake fault. Except at one point, perhaps you do some point. You've got a city where suddenly this leaps into action, rip straight through your whole settlement. And what I find. Absolutely. And is what does that do to your world view? What does it do to you? How you react after that?
That was a wall before, and suddenly it leaps into action. What does it mean? Now, I have no idea what it means, and I don't think classes do. And I don't think archaeologists do because no one's identified these things often from the archaeology point of view, such as walls. But one's really studied what it is to associate with an earthquake fully. So here's the thing. This is a different place. Mycenae, a famous lions gate mycenaean.
And there's that famous link. And there's a famous fault for me. Fault. I mean, it's famous for me. It there's a fault scale that actually cuts the lions gate. In other words, there are cities across the ancient world that have built themselves on the fault lines here, just simply to avoid the laziness of a longer, bigger wall and just use the natural. Now, what does that tell me about seismic hazard? Probably nothing.
We know these places have earthquakes. I think we nothing. But it's a bloomin good story. It's a really good story. I think in the research site. I think it's got much more interesting archaeology. I think that does because suddenly there's a new perspective template start looking into site. But for hazard, I think it's just a story. And I think the point is that you can use that story and you can use that story to tell people.
And at the end, they know those earthquakes and those earthquakes are false. There's something about. So you can use it as a as a tool. Back to Istanbul, for example, we first told this story about Istanbul features in the last big cities health matters. It featured an journalist from the centre of the earth, which is us here, which features the horizon. We've told the story of Istanbul at least three times now, and it's those surprises, people.
And that means that people still don't know where I would have thought is the most basic thing is that Istanbul's wait for a huge earthquake and it's so people know these basic things they actually can't deal with some of the more thorny issues as to what we should actually do. So I guess I guess the point is here that you just you if you've got a good story, you just keep having to tell. You have a simple story. Just battle away at it tomorrow.
By the way, there's a there's a really big earthquake vulnerability conference in sciences and some fantastic speakers there. So if people are interested in that, they should maybe think of it. So why are we doing all this? Why do we tell all these things about earthquakes? What are we actually wanting to get the information across? Well, I think in earthquakes, there is only one story to tell, one message, and that is that we can build to withstand earthquakes.
So why don't we? This is a picture of a primary school in China in the Sichuan earthquake. I think something like 150 children, kids died in that. And yet if you look at the office blocks, neither side hardly touched. And it's not just chain that this happens again and again when earthquakes strike, the buildings that fall down are municipal buildings, schools and hospitals.
And that in the 21st century is despicable, absolutely despicable that we are signs has got to such a level that we can do amazing things even with earthquakes, and yet we can't still get society to put bricks on top of bricks in a secure way. The technology is basic. We knew 50 years ago. We know better now, but we knew it 50 years ago. So for me, all of these programs about finding stories with earthquakes are just opportunities to say the same thing, which is that we can do this.
This is not rocket science, but actually it is rocket science because it involves the social science side of things. And I said, really? Thank you very much.