A love letter from the epicenter — talking about the 1897 Great Assam Earthquake at UCL

I gave a talk at UCL’s Department of CEGE on one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history — and one that happened in my hometown.

The talk traces the 1897 Great Assam Earthquake through an unlikely cast of characters from British-raj India: an administrator whose bungalow crumbled to dust, a geologist improvising a seismometer from tin and bamboo, and a field scientist whose memoir would anchor scientific debate for over a century. The thread runs forward to when two seismologists finally identified the fault — and named it after the man who had been looking in almost the right place.

It is a story about science, power, and incomplete records. And about how a forgotten earthquake from the eastern Himalaya still has things to teach us.

A related essay is on my Substack.