Of all the professors over
the years Nick Ambraseys was my favorite. Greek by birth, he brought some Meditteranean sunshine into the lecture hall on those grey drizzly days of the mid sixties in
South Kensington. He made it clear that he thought things were pretty simple
and he invited us to see it that way too. “Particle velocity? You know that
already, maybe you just haven’t thought about it. If you can know the strength
of the rock, and the shear wave velocity doesn’t vary much, so…” and he would
turn to the blackboard and make a little sketch and it was just like he said,
easy. He liked solutions to problems too. He was working on a way to use steel
straps from packing crates to hold mud brick houses together, like something
you would see in years to come in “The Whole Earth Catalog”.Ambraseys was interested in the effects of earthquakes on dams and originated several of the ideas that became mainstream in seismic studies of dam safety in California in the 1970s, especially after the near catastrophe of the San Fernando dam failure. These included dynamic response
