``We're almost sure we had a million people out there jumping for us. We got some kind of result at every single seismometer around the country,'' Nigel Pain, director of Science Year, told Reuters.
``We generated something like a hundredth of a serious earthquake -- that's not an enormous amount of energy but it's significant.''
I suppose they didn't have any worry about accidentally setting up a sympathetic harmonic and causing a real earthquake. In reading about the first atomic bomb you find that this was a big worry. Since it had never been done before they weren't entirely sure if forces beyond their understanding might cause the atomic splitting to cascade into something much bigger, maybe even combusting the atmosphere.
England is a pretty large place to dissipate a million jumping reebok tremors. What if you did this in silicon valley? Coordinate the whole valley into a mighty jumpfest? Would folks be worried about triggering something they didn't want? According to the article: "Scientists said a million children with an average weight of 110 pounds 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."
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