Two newly acquired U.S. first day covers on earthquakes

I recently purchased two covers with themes of U.S. earthquakes, so I thought I'd highlight them today.

Yesterday there was a significant (magnitude 6.9) earthquake in Croatia, near the capital of Zagreb. I used to teach about earthquakes and seismology in my geophysics courses at Franklin &  Marshall College. I set up and was in charge of an earthquake seismograph, which in recent years has evolved into a station managed by the Lamont-Doherty Seismographic Network. In the early years of cooperation with Lamont, I started and maintained a blog about earthquakes and seismology, The Shaking Earth (still up, but inactive). 

Cover commemorating the 1964 Great Alaskan Earthquake

One cover I bought was prepared by the Anchorage Philatelic Society  after the Easter Sunday Alaska earthquake of March 27, 1964, which occurred less than two months before the Anchorage Stamp Show (APEX). The magnitude 9.2 Anchorage earthquake remains the most powerful earthquake recorded in North American history, and the second most powerful earthquake recorded in world history (after the 1960 Chilean temblor). The cover features the Red Cross Centenary issue stamp (Scott #1239), an Anchorage cancel, and the Apex cachet.

The second souvenir cover has a cachet of the Loma Prieta earthquake and a pictorial cancellation of the flag stamp (Scott #2280). The quake of Oct. 17, 1989, with an epicenter near Santa Cruz, California, ironically occurred immediately before a scheduled World Series game between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's. The magnitude of 6.9 was about 1000 times less energetic than the Alaskan earthquake, but caused significant damage ($5 billion worth) in the major metropolitan Bay Area. It was the second costliest earthquake in U.S. history, behind only the 1994 San Fernando earthquake ($30 billion of damage) in the Los Angeles area.

Cover commemorating the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake

It turns out that no U.S. postage stamps have commemorated earthquakes. Other countries have done so, including the issuance of so-called semipostals, where a surcharge was added to the sales price of the stamp to raise money for relief efforts. There was a short article on Seismological stamp collecting, by Carl A. Von Hake, Earthquakes and Volcanoes, 4(5), 1972, p. 14-19. It lists postage stamps issued by various countries for the following earthquakes: Jamaica (1907), Nicaragua (1931), Argentina (1944), Greece (1953), Yugoslavia (1963). Additional earthquakes commemorated by stamps listed in Seismic Philately (2007) by David J. Leeds are Mexico (400th anniversary of 1542 event), Jamaica (300th anniversary of 1692 event), New Zealand (75th anniversary of 1931 quake), Nepal (1934), Iceland (1947), Algeria (1954), Lebanon (1956), Chile (1960, 1985), Morocco (1960), Iran (1962), Indonesia (1963), South Africa (1969), and Guatemala (1976).

For more information on these and other earthquakes, the U.S. Geological Survey hosts a number of informative web pages.

Recall that number 12 on the list of the 14 special areas of IGY inquiry was seismology, which includes the study of earthquakes. More on seismology and the IGY in posts to come.

Happy Holidays

My collection includes a Season's Greetings card from Antarctica, from the days of the IGY. At least when "wintering over" in Antarctica (according to the Northern hemisphere winter season, that is, which just began two days ago), it is summertime in Antarctica. The typical average daily temperature in Antarctica during the December season is just about freezing (32°F), although this past February, Antarctica recorded its highest ever temperature of 65°F. Coughs, global warming.

Front and back of the greeting card

In case you can not decode the seal, there is a map of Antarctica, a Seabee exhaling and carrying some tools, a penguin, a naval insignia, and the texts "U.S. Naval Mobile Construction Battalion (Special),"  "Deep Freeze II," "IGY 1957-58," and "Detachment Bravo."  Deep Freeze II was actually in 1956-57 (see my earlier blog post). United States Naval Construction Battalions are better known as the Navy Seabees; the term Seabee is a riff on the first letters "C B" from the words Construction Battalion.  According to the Seabee Combat Handbook, volume 1, chapter 1, "one large group of Seabees, called Naval Construction Battalions, Special, functioned as stevedores, loading and off-loading cargo ships." Such battalions were critical in setting up the Antarctic IGY stations.

Inside left and right of the greeting card

Stationary letterhead

And finally, a  personal message for my readers (reader?):

My holiday greeting to you (scribbling is digitally added to the original)

IGY-themed Hanukkah gifts

Hanukkah has already ended. It's is always nice to have my holiday season mostly over before the Xmas brouhaha.

I was quite pleased that my wife picked up on my blog hint and bought a print of the 1956 IGY cartoon from Punch (Nov. 17 post). It looks the same as the copy I finally bought in the magazine, but at 12" x 18" it is suitable for framing (it's really rectangular, my photo just has a perspective crookedness), so it will go up on the walls of my study:

1956 cartoon from Punch, imagining British, American, and Russian Antarctic IGY bases

Then, I could not resist buying for myself a CCCP Sputnik watch. A nice eBay purchase. Although the Soviet Union has an interesting history of watchmaking, this is a recent watch from a Hong-Kong based company, CCCP.

Front of watch. CCCP is a transliteration of Cyrillic USSR, equivalent to Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in English, and 1957 was the launch year for Sputnik

I like the red translucent back of the watch, showing the movement. "Спутник 1" is just Russian for Sputnik 1, the first of three Sputniks launched during the IGY. 

The launching of Sputnik, Earth's first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957, was a hallmark event of the IGY. Both the Soviet Union and the U.S. had planned satellite launches for the IGY. The Soviet Union just "beat us to it," and shocked Americans by this manifestation of its technical prowess during the Cold War and the intercontinental ballistic missile arms race.

I also got two bottle of whiskey from countries that participated in the IGY (ha ha, that's a pretty tenuous connection):

German peated malt Eifel Whiskey and Indian Amrut fusion single malt whisky

They go well with latkes!

Finally (coughs), although I may have said I was done with the NY Times crossword references ... 

The Dec. 16 puzzle had the clue, "Part of a philatelist's collection." The answer, of course: "Stamp."

And for the geophysicists, the Dec. 17 minipuzzle contained the clue, "Crust, mantle, or core," answered with [Earth] "layer."

The crossword connections to my blog are downright eerie!