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| The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below. |
Creating and destroying miniature buildings and other structures is an enjoyable way to spend an hour or two. If watching toy-size skyscrapers shake, crumble, and even disintegrate becomes tiresome, it's always possible to experiment with bricks in saturated sand. While such activities may seem unusual for adults, these experiments, when conducted on a shake table, are a remarkably effective and popular way to illustrate earthquake hazards such as resonance and liquefaction. On a more constructive level, one can easily illustrate ways to reduce or avoid earthquake damage, such as shear-wall strengthening or base isolation. All these demonstrations require a shake table capable of strong motions. Although at first this may seem to be an expensive constraint, creative educators have devised and used a wide variety of shake tables, and a solution is available for almost any budget and educational environment.
The use of shake tables to demonstrate earthquake hazards largely has been
pioneered by the earthquake engineering community, which possesses
considerable experience in this area. A future "EduQuakes" article
will discuss educational shake tables and related activities developed by the
University Consortium on Instructional Shake Tables (UCIST). Yet the natural
link between earthquakes and geology makes these demonstrations highly
relevant to earth science classes, both at the K–12 and university
levels. Physical science classes also will benefit by seeing graphic examples
of phenomena such as resonance. In this column we will provide a brief
San Diego State University rmellors@geology.sdsu.edu
Southern California Earthquake Center degroot@usc.edu
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