December 26, 2004

• Livin’ on shaky ground

  Confession:  I’m an earthquake freak.  I subscribe to BIGQUAKE email bulletins.  There’s a shortcut to NEIC
  in my browser’s link bar.  When I feel a quake, I
  participate.  I go to NEIC and fill out a “felt it” form.  I
  know (and care) about how long it takes P-waves to travel through the
  ground.  I know that tsunamis are not triggered by shaking, but by
  what gets shaken loose underwater and settles to the ocean floor. 
  I was hip to tectonic plates and continental drift long before any of
  that “radical new” science made it into school textbooks. 

  When the 8.1 quake hit north of Macquarie Island off Antarctica on
  December 23, I caught the BIGQUAKE email and started looking up details
  online.  Then I started waiting for the other shoe to drop. 
  Thus, I wasn’t caught by surprise yesterday evening when the BIGQUAKE
  alert for the 9.0 event off Sumatra hit my inbox.  When that alert
  first came out, though, it didn’t say 9.0 magnitude.  It said 8.5,
  and the French Observatory was calling it 8.0, while the Indonesian
  authorities rated it at 6.4.  I didn’t learn until I woke up today
  that it had been upgraded to 9.0.  The last earthquake bigger than
  this one was forty years ago, on Good Friday, here in Alaska.

  I don’t know why I get those “feelings” that earthquakes are coming –
  I hadn’t had any presentiment of the one off Antarctica — and I
  haven’t a clue how that “sense” might work.  I don’t know, either,
  how and why it is that I feel small local quakes that nearly no one
  else around me is aware of.  Not knowing how and why is a minor
  little itch in the back of my mind, while the WHAT of it gets most of
  my attention.  In the earth’s crust one thing leads to another in
  a ripple effect, and I’m more interested in where the next shock will
  occur than in when.  That it WILL come, that the pressure will be
  released somewhere, is a given.  I’m intensely interested in the
  patterns of distribution.

  Before I got internet access, my ability to monitor this stuff was much
  less, and the attention I paid to it was more sporadic.  I’d
  notice when some big event made the news or when I was feeling a lot of
  local shaking, and I’d get curious.  Now I have access to maps and charts and tables,
  and I spend time studying them.  The Pacific Ring of Fire has been
  getting a lot of my attention in recent months because it has been
  active.  Sometimes I just gaze at the map
  (the one below shows activity 8-30 days ago) to see what I see. 
  I’m not looking for anything in particular.  I wouldn’t know what
  to look for.  I just look and sometimes I see a pattern. 
  Here I see a pattern of deep events, but I’d have to go to the charts
  and tables to get the timing of them before they’d make any sense to
  me.  Maybe I will, or maybe I’ll go back and search the news for
  some more reports of the human side of last night’s events.  It’s
  all fascinating to me.
  
  Yesterday when I’d seen the BIGQUAKE alert and went to Google News,
  there were two stories available.  That’s when I learned of the
  disparity among the magnitude reports.  By the time I stopped
  haunting the news sites about six hours later and went to bed, there
  were over 600 reports.  When I got up today there were almost
  2,000, and it had become the top story.

  In imagination, I hear the cries of, “Oh, the humanity!”  Some of
  the news reports of tsunami damage and casualties I’ve been reading
  today list several previous tsunamis that have hit the same
  areas.  One of the interesting facts about our species is that we
  apparently like to settle on shaky ground, on some of the most
  dangerous ground around.  The “cradle of civilization” was in the
  area of crumbled crust where several plates meet and there is nothing
  even remotely resembling solid bedrock.  The planet’s largest
  cities are located on the margins of oceans and in the flood plains of
  great rivers.  I understand the economics and logistics involved
  there, the proximity to navigable water, not to mention the attraction
  of ocean breezes and ocean views.  What I don’t understand is the
  surprise and consternation exhibited when the earth and the oceans do
  what they’ve been doing all along.

  I’ve lived on the prairies where the relative safety from shaking and
  flooding is offset by the wind.  They can have it.  My
  preference is for mountains.  The place I’ve chosen to live is
  another area where there is no solid bedrock.  Here at the edge of
  the North American plate, where the Pacific Plate has thrust these
  mountains up and has ground the earth’s crust to bits, we have
  volcanos, too.  The wind blows, the ground shakes, the snow piles
  up, and occasionally there’s volcanic ash piling up as well.  It’s
  that kind of planet, filled with breathtaking vistas and all the things
  we need to support life, as well as any number of hazards that might at
  any moment snuff out a few thousand of our lives.  That’s life on
  planet Earth.  I love it — don’t you?
  

  • 6:22 pm
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