/ 9 September 2001

ONE MILLION KIDS PLAN JUMP TO CREATE QUAKE

ONE million British school children will jump up and down simultaneously on Friday in a bid to create an earthquake and enter the record books as the world’s largest scientific experiment. Thousands of schools around Britain have been asked to send children out into the playgrounds at 11 a.m (1000 GMT) to jump up and down for a minute in the hope of creating a measurable quake. ”Will it make an impact on Britain’s seismic network? Nobody knows — that’s why we are doing the experiment,” the organisers of The Giant Jump event, held to mark the launch of the government’s Science Year, said on its website. Scientists say a million children with an average weight of 50kg jumping 20 times in a minute would release two billion joules of energy and trigger the equivalent of an earthquake measuring three on the Richter scale. – Reuters