John Walsh might be said to more inordinate than Shakespeare. According to Samuel Johnson, the latter "never has six lines together without a fault; perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion."
But in the case of John Walsh consider the abstract to his John Jackson Lecture at the RDS tomorrow evening: "The preferential growth of large faults reflects the progressive localisation of displacement, and deformation, onto fewer and larger faults, a fundamental characteristic of fault systems on all scales." I rest my case m'lud.
John Walsh, however, unlike the Bard of Avon, would freely admit a tendency towards faults. In fact he is an expert on them, and on their importance in seismology. He is a member of the Fault Analysis Group at the Department of Geology at UCD.
Let me tell you all I know of faults. Our planet, we are told, is encrusted with a fragmented layer of solid rock whose segments, rather like a cracked eggshell, float as a series of plates on the molten "white" beneath.
At the edges of these plates we find the faults, boundaries between one plate and another, and they define the major earthquake regions of the world.
In some places the plates slide past each other smoothly and without consequence; in others they do so in a kind of "stickslip" motion.
Sometimes they may "stick" for several decades - and then slip suddenly by several yards producing, unexpectedly, an earthquake.
The most famous fault of all, the San Andreas, runs the length of the Californian coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles, but there are many others along the entire west coast of North and South America.
Other faulty zones include the Mediterranean basin continuing towards the Middle East, the east coast of Asia, and the East Indies.
I did not know, however, that "much of offshore Ireland and the North Sea owe their existence to ancient fault systems that are a response to extension of the earth's crust and accommodate crustal thinning and subsidence with the formation of sedimentary basins". But so John Walsh maintains.
The annual John Jackson Memorial Lecture is jointly organised by the Royal Irish Academy and the Royal Dublin Society. This is the seventh of the series, and the speakers are invariably scientists who have made a significant contribution to their chosen discipline.
John Walsh's topic "The Long Term Effects Of Earthquakes: Revealing The Hidden Charms And Tremors Of Ancient Fault Systems" is at 6.30 p.m. tomorrow at the RDS, Ballsbridge, through the members' door.