Over at Science Magazine its longtime, ace news writer Richard A. Kerr last week had the major role in an enterprising story. Now he is wondering why a rather sensational scientific development on which he and co-author Richard Stone have pretty much a scoop has fallen flat elsewhere in the media. After reading it, one has to join his wonderment. He followed up a presentation at December’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union. It suggested that the immense earthquake last May in Sichuan Province had a human-made trigger: the new Zipingku Dam that sits almost on the epicenter.  His further evidence includes a seismology article, dug up by co-author Stone in Beijing, on that theme in a recent issue of a Chinese journal. The article does not suggest that the whole quake was powered by the strain generated by the rapidly-filled (and then partly unfilled) reservoir. Rather, that there is a plausible argument that the weight yo-yo was just enough to push the nearby, already-stressed fault into local failure. Thus, starting in Zipingku the fault unzipped on through 300 km more of its trace. So, exactly such a quake may have occurred anyway – but maybe centuries from now. This dam, by the way, was extensively featured in post-quake stories because it cracked, raising fears that it might fail.

The evidence for this anthropogenic calamity may be growing but the idea is not new. The Tracker discovered, for instance, a post last June 11 by geologist Chris Rowan, at his blog Highly Allochthonous, entertaining the same hypothesis. But this does raise an issue for journalists to ponder. Few reporters have any compunctions about jumping on news brought to them by press releases. This even though even the best and most ethically-done releases have at least some element of self-service to them. But if it’s another, presumably fully objective reporter’s work – and by and large the reporters at such trade and professional mags as Science, Nature, Chemical & Engineering News, Chronicle of Higher Education etc are real reporters – there seems to be some reluctance to follow. Kerr was the only reporter to attend the pertinent AGU session, and the paper had no press release or press conference to give it a spotlight. The thought on reading the result may be, “Oh look, Dick has a pretty good story here” but that’s it. It is easy to think, perhaps, that if another reporter has it, it’s old news?

-CP

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.