Stanford Today Edition: May/June, 1998 Section: Science and Medicine: The Trojan Horse - An Earthquake? WWW: The Trojan Horse - An Earthquake?
Science and Medicine News
Don't blame a hollow horse full of sneaky Greeks for the destruction of ancient Troy. Over a period of 50 years around 1200 B.C., a string of killing earthquakes may have toppled dozens of bustling centers of scholarship and industry, the great Bronze Age civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, including Troy, Mycenae and Knossos.
Historians and archaeologists long have cited civil war, invasion and pestilence as possible causes of such widespread destruction. But Stanford geophysicist Amos Nur sees another possibility: The earth moved. Earthquake activity also may be at the root of the biblical prophecy of Armageddon, the site of the final conflict between good and evil. According to Nur, the repeated destruction of the city of Megiddo probably inspired the author of Revelation to script his haunting prediction of the Apocalypse.
For more than 20 years, Nur has studied the role of earthquakes in the Eastern Mediterranean. By poking around the ruins of Megiddo and other ancient cities, he has gleaned fundamental information about the patterns of large quakes. Amidst the rubble of the ancients, Nur discovered clues that may help modern geophysicists understand when and why earthquakes occur. His findings suggest that earthquakes are episodic - periods of greater earthquake activity are bracketed by periods of relative quiet. Large quakes may trigger other large quakes, in a domino effect that zips down a fault line, knocking down cities along the way.
Nur, the Wayne Loel Professor of Earth Sciences, director of the Rock Physics and Borehole Project, and chair of Stanford's geophysics department, is an expert on the physics of large-scale earth movements, including earthquakes.
"Although human history in this region provided evidence for bygone earthquakes, it was recent advances in our understanding of plate tectonics which imparted unexpected insights about the destruction of ancient cities," he said.