Temblors & tunnels
For nearly 100 years, global seismic events—from earthquakes to hydrogen bombs—have reverberated throughout Haviland Hall.
One of the first seismographs in the western hemisphere was installed in the Students’ Observatory on Observatory Hill in 1897, just a couple hundred feet east of Haviland, “to keep a register of all earthquake shocks in order to be able to control the positions of the astronomical instruments” the observatory used. Soon, though, earthquakes became a research focus in their own right, helped hugely (and unsurprisingly) by the 1906 San Francisco quake.
Within a few years, the seismographic instruments were relocated to a vault under the new Doe Library, but when that space became inadequate, a geological survey helped identify a better location in the late 1920s. Detailed plans were developed for an underground vault below the Student Observatory, to be entered via a tunnel from Haviland’s sub-basement. The Depression squelched those plans, but Haviland’s tunnel, sitting on stable bedrock, was found more than satisfactory, and vastly cheaper. The School of Education had originally built the tunnel for use as an auditory and visual testing laboratory for school children, but it quickly became outmoded. By August 1930, new seismographic instruments had been installed in the Haviland sub-basement.
During the Cold War, the Haviland Hall seismograph played a small part in the nuclear arms race. UC Berkeley Professor Edward Teller, a nuclear physicist known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” recalled descending to the Haviland Hall seismograph in October 1952 to monitor the first hydrogen bomb test, codenamed “Mike,” in the Eniwetok Atoll, 3,000 miles west of Hawaiʻi. The seismograph rested on a concrete pier, dimly lit by a red lamp:
After my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I noticed that the light spot seemed quite unsteady. Clearly, this was more than what could be due to the continuous trembling of the Earth—the microseisms . . . So I braced a pencil on a piece of the apparatus and held it close to the luminous point. Now the point seemed steady and I felt as if I had come back to solid ground again. This was about the time of the actual shot . . . About a quarter of an hour was required for the shot [waves] to travel from deep under the Pacific basin to the California coast. I waited with little patience, the seismograph making at each minute a clearly visible vibration which served as a time signal. At last the time signal came that had to be followed by the shock from the explosion. There it seemed to be: the luminous point appeared to dance wildly and irregularly. Was it only that the pencil which I held as a marker trembled in my hand? Finally the film was taken off and developed. Then the trace appeared on the photographic plate. It was clear and big and unmistakable. It had been made by the wave of compression that had traveled for thousands of miles and brought the positive assurance that Mike was a success.
By the beginning of the 1960s, seismographs had become critical not just to study earthquakes, but to monitor nuclear tests in the Soviet Union and other countries. By this time, Haviland Hall had become too “noisy” during the day for precise monitoring. In 1962, the most sensitive equipment relocated to a new vault, funded by the Defense Department, in the hills of Strawberry Canyon.
Still, the Haviland vault retained basic instruments capable of detecting large seismic events around the world. In November 1980, they recorded a major underwater quake off the coast of Northern California. As the San Francisco Examiner reported:
In the campus police office in Sproul Hall, dispatcher Sharon Pagter, 23, was talking by phone to Berkeley police when she noticed the red light winking at the bottom right of her alarm panel, accompanied by a high-pitched buzzing.
“Oh, gee whiz,” she said, “we’ve got an earthquake.”
She called the first of five names on her seismologists’ duty list, Dr. Robert Uhrhammer. There was no reply, but she was luckier with her second call to graduate student Jim Marrone, 28. Her final call was to the state Office of Emergency Services in Sacramento.
Since the mid-1990s, Haviland’s seismograph has been used mainly to record data for comparison with historical seismographic paper records. It is designated as station BRK, part of the Berkeley Digital Seismic Network, which maintains more than 170 stations around the state. For many decades, the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory maintained offices and equipment in the south end of the Haviland’s basement floor. They moved out in the mid-2000s, and the basement space is currently occupied by the School of Social Welfare.
Written by Craig Alderson