The school that hears the world shake, by Callum Ferrier

An original contemporary newspaper article.

In a corner of the physics laboratory at Hollins Moor Academy, beneath a bench that nobody is allowed to lean on, sits a grey box about the size of a shoebox. It is a seismometer, and since last September it has recorded more than two hundred earthquakes, some of them on the other side of the planet.

The instrument was lent to the school by a university geology department as part of a scheme to place sensors in classrooms across the north of England. It had to be bolted to the concrete floor rather than a table, because even the vibration of a door closing can blur its readings. A cable runs from the box to a laptop that draws a wobbling line across the screen, day and night.

Physics teacher Anita Dorey says the line has changed the way her Year 9 pupils think about the ground beneath them. ‘They used to believe earthquakes only happened in films,’ she said. ‘Now they come in before registration to check whether anything has arrived overnight.’ When a large earthquake struck near Japan in February, the waves reached the Pennines in less than a quarter of an hour, and a group of pupils ran to the lab at lunchtime to print out the trace.

Their recordings are shared online with scientists, who use data from hundreds of schools to locate earthquakes more precisely.

(a) How many earthquakes has the seismometer recorded since last September? (b) Why did the seismometer have to be bolted to the concrete floor? (c) What do the pupils’ actions suggest about their attitude to the seismometer?