 | Yale scientist Jeffrey Park's analysis of the seismological data on the New Haven Coliseum demolition reveals that the collapse shook the city's foundations far less than the earthquake on the other side of the world that caused the 2004 tsunami. |
The implosion of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum on Jan. 20 may have rocked the world of many New Haveners, but it registered nary a blip on the Richter Scale, according to Yale scientists.
The earth-shaking impact of the demolition of the four-acre building near the Oak Street Connector was recorded on a seismometer located across town in the basement of Yale's Kline Geology Laboratory on Whitney Avenue.
The seismic blip generated by the Coliseum's demolition was only slightly above the level of "background noise," according to Jeffrey Park, professor of geology and geophysics, who analyzed the data.
Prior to the implosion, Yale students were invited by Steven M. Girvin, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, to take part in a contest to estimate the magnitude of the Coliseum "quake."
All of them overestimated.
T H I S
Coliseum collapse was barely
a blip, seismologically speaking
According to Park, the earthquake that spawned the devasting tsunami in the Indian Ocean that occurred in December 2004 registered between 9.1 and 9.3 on the Richter Scale and moved New Haven by a full centimeter. By contrast, he says, the Coliseum collapse registered between 1.0 and 1.5 on the Richter Scale, and it moved the city by mere microns. About 8,000 events under 2.0 on the Richter Scale are recorded every day.
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Coliseum collapse was barely a blip, seismologically speaking
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