There’s no doubt that the Bohol killer earthquake last October 15 was a horrendous cataclysm, but I think some of the media reportage about it has been terribly amateurish and, at worst, misleading. I’ll analyze from a language standpoint just two descriptions of that earthquake by two major Metro Manila dailies.
Here’s Description #1:
An earthquake with energy equivalent to “32 Hiroshima bombs” jolted the Visayas, and parts of Mindanao and southern Luzon early Tuesday morning, causing centuries-old churches and modern buildings to crumble, disrupting power and phone services, setting off stampedes and killing at least 97 people.
The nuclear bomb dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945, packed power equal to 20,000 tons of TNT.
That description is actually a paraphrase of this generic statement of Dr. Renato Solidum, Phivolcs executive director, in a televised briefing: “A magnitude 7 earthquake has an energy equivalent to around 32 Hiroshima atomic bombs.” What that newspaper did was to directly equate Dr. Solidum’s estimate of the seismic energy theoretically released by a magnitude 7 earthquake with the real-life destructive power of the Bohol earthquake.
I’m sure that Dr. Solidum meant well in trying to give media and laymen a sense of the immense energy unleashed by that earthquake. I must say though that his comparative mathematics just evoked sensational but misleading imagery that some media people were only too glad to latch their news stories on. Indeed, I think that although his natural science and mathematics are beyond reproach, it was most unfortunate for him to make that comparison in his briefing.
The most problematic aspect of Dr. Solidum’s comparison is that the energy released by the Bohol earthquake was largely in the form of seismic waves that caused the ground to shake perilously, thus demolishing or damaging so many infrastructures, killing over 150 people, and injuring hundreds of others over a wide swath in the Visayas; in contrast, the Hiroshima bombing was a massive explosion and firestorm in just one city. Specifically, based on historical accounts, that blast was equivalent to 16,000 tons of TNT with an estimated total destruction radius of 1 mile or 1.6 kilometers, killing 70,000–80,000 people and injuring 70,000 others.
So, although ostensibly of the same magnitude, the forms of energy released by the two cataclysmic events—one seismic and the other atomic—are different and therefore not comparable at all. We can readily see the fallacy of making them equivalent by imagining 32 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs simultaneously detonating on Bohol and its adjoining islands. The destruction would be unimaginably horrific—truly the end of the world for that part of the Philippine archipelago!
This kind of misleading mathematical analogy reminds me of a factoid about the energy produced every second by the sun—our sun. It’s about a trillion 1-megaton bombs, or, in Dr. Solidum’s mathematics, the energy equivalent of 50 billion Hiroshima atomic-bomb explosions. Yet, despite all that energy unleashed by the sun on Earth and the rest of the planets, humanity has survived over the millennia and has been none the worse for it. (The reason, of course, is that it’s neither seismic nor explosive but radiant energy that reaches us.)
Now here’s Description #2:
The magnitude 7.2 earthquake that struck Bohol and Central Visayas on Tuesday morning is as strong as dozens of atomic bombs used in World War II, the chief state volcanologist said.
I won’t even bother to analyze this grossly erroneous paraphrase of Dr. Solidum’s comparative imagery. I’ll just point out that historically, only two atomic bombs—not dozens—were used in World War II, one each in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This is really the problem with esoteric comparative mathematics that experts glibly provide as sound bites for mass media. As in this case, they can lead to all sorts of misinterpretations that only serve to confound or alarm the public.
This essay originally appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times
, October 19, 2013 issue © 2013 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.RELATED ESSAY:Logic and language
