Samoa observatory

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The Samoa Observatory of the Royal Society of Sciences in Göttingen was built in 1902 in the colony of German Samoa near Apia by Otto Tetens at the suggestion of Emil Wiechert . As can be seen from the name, this seismic observatory was part of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences .

Among other things, it was equipped with an astatic pendulum . This gave Wiechert many insights into the path of earthquake waves through the earth's interior. Its 1000 kg horizontal pendulum was so sensitive that it fell over several times when there were strong quakes nearby. The 80 kg vertical pendulum was used for a long time to experiment with damping and magnetic astasing. The absolute time of the phases could thus be determined with a maximum of six seconds.

The time was determined fortnightly with a meridian instrument and sidereal time chronometer. In between they were dependent on a Knoblich ship's chronometer and, for control purposes, on a Bröcking sidereal time chronometer until they received a more accurate pendulum clock in 1910.

Since the seismograph was only 1.2 km away from the reef , the impact of the swell was recorded very strongly. Since the house stood on coral sand, distant tremors were strongly dampened.

After Tetens, Franz Linke became the director, followed by Kurt Wegener from 1908 to 1911 . In 1913/14 Ludwig Carl Geiger was the director, then Gustav Angenheister until after the First World War.

literature

  • Kurt Wegener : The seismic registrations at the Samoa observatory of the Kgl. Society of Sciences in Göttingen in 1909 and 1910 .
  • List of major earthquakes recorded at the Samoa Observatory from 1913-20 . In: Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Mathematisch-Physikalische Klasse , 1922. Available at digizeitschriften.de
  • G. Angenheister: The air-electric observations at the Samoa Observatory 1906, 1907, 1908
  • Wegener: The aerological results in 1910 at the Samoa Observatory of the Royal Society of Sciences in Göttingen

Web links

Coordinates: 13 ° 48 ′ 56 ″  S , 171 ° 46 ′ 50 ″  W.