1. Our planet is full of famous shaky spots — California, Japan, New Zealand and so on — but the father of modern seismology hailed from comparatively stable Ireland.
2. In 1849, Dublin-born engineer Robert Mallet detonated kegs of gunpowder he’d buried on a beach to test how shock waves traveled through rock and other material: the world’s first seismological experiment.
3. We’ve also got Mallet to thank for the very word seismology. He coined the term from the Greek seismos, or earthquake.
