Earthquakes

Earthquakes Earthquakes Throughout history, man has made many advancements. These advancements have been made to make life easier. The one thing man can't do is to control Mother Nature. Mother Nature can cause many things such as earthquakes. The causes of earthquakes have been theorized in many ways. According to the book Predicting Earthquakes by Gregory Vogt, the Greeks, "blamed the earthquakes on Poseidon, god of the sea"(25). The Hindu believed that "the earth was a platform that rested on the back of eight great elephants. When one of the elephants grew weary, it lowered and shook its head causing the ground above to tremble"(Vogt 25). Margaret Poynter writes "many primitive people thought that the earth rested upon the back of some sort of animal. When that animal became restless, great cracks appeared in the ground, and tall trees swayed and fell. In South America, the animal was a whale. In Japan, it was a great black spider or giant catfish. One ancient tribe thought that four bulls supported the earth on their horns. To amuse themselves, they sometimes tossed it from one to another"(6). In the same book, Poynter says "The Chinese believed that monsters lived earthquakes, waves, scale, book, wave, two, one, name, make, earth, objects, miles, about, world, station, states, seismometer, seismologist, scientists, putnam, out, moved, marcus, kinds, ground, great, first, felt, fault, epicenter, buildings, ball, animal, last, york, volcanoes, time, thought, tells, surface, say, poynter, plates, nature, modified, mercali, man