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Plate tectonics as a science is less than 40 years old. It is possible that common sense suggests what science has yet to confirm: that the movement among the world's tectonic plates may be one part of enormous dynamic system, with effects of one plate's shifting more likely than not to spread far, far away, quite possibly clear across the surface of the globe..
In recent decades, thanks largely to the controversial Gaia Theory developed by the British scientists James Lovelock, it has become ever more respectable to consider the planet as one immense and eternally interacting living system - the living planet, floating in space, every part of its great engine affecting every other, for good or for ill.
-- "The Year the Earth Fought Back" by Simon Winchester for The NY Times
In the face of this macabre natural disaster in Asia, where the death tolls now exceeds sixty thousand, Mr. Winchester brings out how this year has been particularly bad for natural disasters, and how these episodes seem to come in clusters as an historical matter, bringing out the example of 1906, for instance, the year of the Great San Francisco Earthquake which had its counter-parts elsewhwere in America and the world.
He raises the question: "might there be some kind of butterfly effect, latent and deadly, lying out in the seismic world?"
___ ___ ___
London — LIKE two bookends of calamity, earthquakes at Bam in Iran and off Sumatra in Indonesia have delineated a year of unusual seismic ferocity - a year, one might say, of living dangerously. Twelve months, almost to the very hour, before Sunday's extraordinary release of stress at the India-Burma tectonic plate boundary, a similar jolt at the boundary of the Arabian and the Eurasian Plates devastated one of the most celebrated of Persian caravan cities. The televised images of Bam's collapsed citadel and the sight of thousands of bodies being carried from the desert ruins haunted the world then just as the images of the drowned around the shores of the Bay of Bengal do today.
But that has not been the half of it. True, these two disasters were, in terms of their numbers of casualties, by far the most lethal. But in the 12 months that separated them, there have been many other ruinous and seismically ominous events, occurring in places that seem at first blush to be entirely disconnected.
This year just ending - which the all-too-seismically-aware Chinese will remind us has been that of the Monkey, and so generally much prone to terrestrial mischief - has seen killer earthquakes in Morocco in February and Japan's main island of Honshu in October. The Japan temblor left us with one widely published image - of a bullet-train, derailed and lying on its side - that was, in its own way, an augury of a very considerable power: no such locomotive had ever been brought low before, and the Japanese were properly vexed by its melancholy symbolism.
In America, too, this year there have been some peculiar signs. Not only has Mount St. Helens been acting up in the most serious fashion since its devastating eruption of May 1980, but on one bright mid-autumn day in California this year the great San Andreas Fault, where the North American and Pacific Plates rub alongside one another, ruptured. It was on Sept. 28, early in the morning, near the town of Parkfield - where, by chance, a deep hole was being drilled directly down into the fault by geologists to try to discern the fault's inner mysteries.
The rupture produced a quake of magnitude 6.0 - and though it did not kill anyone, it frightened millions, not least the government scientists who have the fault in their care. They had expected this particular quake to have occurred years beforehand - and had thought a seismic event so unlikely at the time that most were at a conference in Chicago when it happened. They rushed home, fascinated to examine their instruments, but eager also to allay fears that their drilling had anything to do with the tremors.
As every American schoolchild knows, the most notorious rupture of this same fault occurred nearly a century ago, at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906 - an occurrence now known around the world as the great San Francisco Earthquake. An entire city, a monument to the hopes and dreams of America's westward expansion, was destroyed by a mere 40 seconds of shaking. It was an occurrence possessed of a historical significance that may well be matched by the tragedy now unfolding on the far side of the world.
But, curiously, it turns out that there were many other equally momentous seismic events taking place elsewhere in the world in 1906 as well. Ten weeks before the San Francisco quake there was one of magnitude 8.2 on the frontier between Colombia and Ecuador; then on Feb. 16 there was a violent rupture under the Caribbean island of St. Lucia;then on March 1, 200 people were killed by an earthquake on Formosa; and then, to pile Pelion upon Ossa, Mt. Vesuvius in Italy erupted, killing hundreds.
But even then it wasn't over. The grand finale of the year's seismic upheaval took place in Chile in August, a quake that all but destroyed the port of Valparaiso. Twenty thousand people were killed. Small wonder that the Chinese, who invented the seismograph and who tend to take the long view of all historical happenings, note in their writings that 1906 was a highly unusual Year of the Fire Horse, when devastating consequences are wont to abound, worldwide.
Given these cascades of disasters past and present, one can only wonder: might there be some kind of butterfly effect, latent and deadly, lying out in the seismic world? There is of course no hard scientific truth - no firm certainty that a rupture on a tectonic boundary in the western Pacific (in Honshu, say) can lead directly to a break in a boundary in the eastern Pacific (in Parkfield), or another in the eastern Indian ocean (off Sumatra, say). But anecdotally, as this year has so tragically shown, there is evidence aplenty.
Plate tectonics as a science is less than 40 years old. It is possible that common sense suggests what science has yet to confirm: that the movement among the world's tectonic plates may be one part of enormous dynamic system, with effects of one plate's shifting more likely than not to spread far, far away, quite possibly clear across the surface of the globe..
In recent decades, thanks largely to the controversial Gaia Theory developed by the British scientists James Lovelock, it has become ever more respectable to consider the planet as one immense and eternally interacting living system - the living planet, floating in space, every part of its great engine affecting every other, for good or for ill.
Mr. Lovelock's notion, which he named after the earth goddess of the Ancient Greeks, makes much of the delicacy of the balance that mankind's environmental carelessness increasingly threatens. But his theory also acknowledges the somber necessity of natural happenings, many of which seem in human terms so tragically unjust, as part of a vast system of checks and balances. The events that this week destroyed the shores of the Indian Ocean, and which leveled the city of Bam a year ago, were of unmitigated horror: but they may also serve some deeper planetary purpose, one quite hidden to our own beliefs.
It is worth noting that scientists have discovered that the geysers in Yellowstone National Park started to erupt much more frequently in the days immediately following a huge earthquake in central Alaska in 2002. There turned out to be a connection, one hitherto quite unrealized, that intimately linked places thousands of miles apart. Geologists are now looking for other possible links - sure in the knowledge that if real geological connections can be determined, then we may in due course be able to divine from events on one side of the planet indications that will allow us to warn people on the other - and so perhaps allow them to prepare, as those in today's Indian Ocean communities never were able, for the next time.
For one thing is certain, and comfortless: on earth, eternally restless and alive, there will, and without a scintilla of doubt, be a next time.
Simon Winchester is the author of "Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883."
-- Simon Winchester
.
~~~
Plate tectonics as a science is less than 40 years old. It is possible that common sense suggests what science has yet to confirm: that the movement among the world's tectonic plates may be one part of enormous dynamic system, with effects of one plate's shifting more likely than not to spread far, far away, quite possibly clear across the surface of the globe..
In recent decades, thanks largely to the controversial Gaia Theory developed by the British scientists James Lovelock, it has become ever more respectable to consider the planet as one immense and eternally interacting living system - the living planet, floating in space, every part of its great engine affecting every other, for good or for ill.
-- "The Year the Earth Fought Back" by Simon Winchester for The NY Times
In the face of this macabre natural disaster in Asia, where the death tolls now exceeds sixty thousand, Mr. Winchester brings out how this year has been particularly bad for natural disasters, and how these episodes seem to come in clusters as an historical matter, bringing out the example of 1906, for instance, the year of the Great San Francisco Earthquake which had its counter-parts elsewhwere in America and the world.
He raises the question: "might there be some kind of butterfly effect, latent and deadly, lying out in the seismic world?"
___ ___ ___
London — LIKE two bookends of calamity, earthquakes at Bam in Iran and off Sumatra in Indonesia have delineated a year of unusual seismic ferocity - a year, one might say, of living dangerously. Twelve months, almost to the very hour, before Sunday's extraordinary release of stress at the India-Burma tectonic plate boundary, a similar jolt at the boundary of the Arabian and the Eurasian Plates devastated one of the most celebrated of Persian caravan cities. The televised images of Bam's collapsed citadel and the sight of thousands of bodies being carried from the desert ruins haunted the world then just as the images of the drowned around the shores of the Bay of Bengal do today.
But that has not been the half of it. True, these two disasters were, in terms of their numbers of casualties, by far the most lethal. But in the 12 months that separated them, there have been many other ruinous and seismically ominous events, occurring in places that seem at first blush to be entirely disconnected.
This year just ending - which the all-too-seismically-aware Chinese will remind us has been that of the Monkey, and so generally much prone to terrestrial mischief - has seen killer earthquakes in Morocco in February and Japan's main island of Honshu in October. The Japan temblor left us with one widely published image - of a bullet-train, derailed and lying on its side - that was, in its own way, an augury of a very considerable power: no such locomotive had ever been brought low before, and the Japanese were properly vexed by its melancholy symbolism.
In America, too, this year there have been some peculiar signs. Not only has Mount St. Helens been acting up in the most serious fashion since its devastating eruption of May 1980, but on one bright mid-autumn day in California this year the great San Andreas Fault, where the North American and Pacific Plates rub alongside one another, ruptured. It was on Sept. 28, early in the morning, near the town of Parkfield - where, by chance, a deep hole was being drilled directly down into the fault by geologists to try to discern the fault's inner mysteries.
The rupture produced a quake of magnitude 6.0 - and though it did not kill anyone, it frightened millions, not least the government scientists who have the fault in their care. They had expected this particular quake to have occurred years beforehand - and had thought a seismic event so unlikely at the time that most were at a conference in Chicago when it happened. They rushed home, fascinated to examine their instruments, but eager also to allay fears that their drilling had anything to do with the tremors.
As every American schoolchild knows, the most notorious rupture of this same fault occurred nearly a century ago, at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906 - an occurrence now known around the world as the great San Francisco Earthquake. An entire city, a monument to the hopes and dreams of America's westward expansion, was destroyed by a mere 40 seconds of shaking. It was an occurrence possessed of a historical significance that may well be matched by the tragedy now unfolding on the far side of the world.
But, curiously, it turns out that there were many other equally momentous seismic events taking place elsewhere in the world in 1906 as well. Ten weeks before the San Francisco quake there was one of magnitude 8.2 on the frontier between Colombia and Ecuador; then on Feb. 16 there was a violent rupture under the Caribbean island of St. Lucia;then on March 1, 200 people were killed by an earthquake on Formosa; and then, to pile Pelion upon Ossa, Mt. Vesuvius in Italy erupted, killing hundreds.
But even then it wasn't over. The grand finale of the year's seismic upheaval took place in Chile in August, a quake that all but destroyed the port of Valparaiso. Twenty thousand people were killed. Small wonder that the Chinese, who invented the seismograph and who tend to take the long view of all historical happenings, note in their writings that 1906 was a highly unusual Year of the Fire Horse, when devastating consequences are wont to abound, worldwide.
Given these cascades of disasters past and present, one can only wonder: might there be some kind of butterfly effect, latent and deadly, lying out in the seismic world? There is of course no hard scientific truth - no firm certainty that a rupture on a tectonic boundary in the western Pacific (in Honshu, say) can lead directly to a break in a boundary in the eastern Pacific (in Parkfield), or another in the eastern Indian ocean (off Sumatra, say). But anecdotally, as this year has so tragically shown, there is evidence aplenty.
Plate tectonics as a science is less than 40 years old. It is possible that common sense suggests what science has yet to confirm: that the movement among the world's tectonic plates may be one part of enormous dynamic system, with effects of one plate's shifting more likely than not to spread far, far away, quite possibly clear across the surface of the globe..
In recent decades, thanks largely to the controversial Gaia Theory developed by the British scientists James Lovelock, it has become ever more respectable to consider the planet as one immense and eternally interacting living system - the living planet, floating in space, every part of its great engine affecting every other, for good or for ill.
Mr. Lovelock's notion, which he named after the earth goddess of the Ancient Greeks, makes much of the delicacy of the balance that mankind's environmental carelessness increasingly threatens. But his theory also acknowledges the somber necessity of natural happenings, many of which seem in human terms so tragically unjust, as part of a vast system of checks and balances. The events that this week destroyed the shores of the Indian Ocean, and which leveled the city of Bam a year ago, were of unmitigated horror: but they may also serve some deeper planetary purpose, one quite hidden to our own beliefs.
It is worth noting that scientists have discovered that the geysers in Yellowstone National Park started to erupt much more frequently in the days immediately following a huge earthquake in central Alaska in 2002. There turned out to be a connection, one hitherto quite unrealized, that intimately linked places thousands of miles apart. Geologists are now looking for other possible links - sure in the knowledge that if real geological connections can be determined, then we may in due course be able to divine from events on one side of the planet indications that will allow us to warn people on the other - and so perhaps allow them to prepare, as those in today's Indian Ocean communities never were able, for the next time.
For one thing is certain, and comfortless: on earth, eternally restless and alive, there will, and without a scintilla of doubt, be a next time.
Simon Winchester is the author of "Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883."
-- Simon Winchester
.
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no subject
Date: 2004-12-29 02:33 pm (UTC)From:In the second half of 2002, there was an earthquake of sorts here. It happened in the early hours. I heard the shop windows vibrate in the street, and a slight shake, and went to look if a heavy lorry had hit something. That was all we got, and the biggest we have had in human memory. It happened the day I was signing the papers to sell the building, which is one of those things that makes it memorable for me.
I was reading that the recent quake was suspected to have shortened the year and tilted the earth's axis. Now the former seems quite plausible on grounds of the earth's moment of inertia. The latter I can't quite grasp without revisiting the mathematics, bit the former is fairly obviously possible - in a very small way.
Geology is not my field, but I was thinking how there was nothing more likely than that such an effect as plate movement in one place would result in other movements elsewhere - whether sudden and dramatic, or slow, going unnoticed. If the earth is indeed a series of interlocked plates (I have no reason to doubt that) then I can't see how it can be otherwise.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-29 06:19 pm (UTC)From:The way I hear it is that our day has lost a fraction of a second, which in itself seems astounding to me - having never heard of such an effect. It makes one sensitive to how fragile the works may be.
I was thinking how there was nothing more likely than that such an effect as plate movement in one place would result in other movements elsewhere
What I suppose is more counter-intuitive is how there can be such a time-delay between events that would be related under this theory - how a major earthquake in Iran translates into this tsunami, with about a year separating them.
Personally, I've never been in an earthquake. I live close to a tornado zone, but I haven't been caught in one of those strikes either, in memory at least. The folks said we had one in my early childhood, but it's lost to me and without regrets.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-30 03:53 am (UTC)From:So if the action of one plate pressing on another forces one underneath the other, that could cause the distribution of mass to get nearer the centre. The result of that must be that there is increased pressure deeper down. And that in turn means that somewhere that pressure is going to have to be released. It seems to me to be just as practical for an earthquake to have the opposite effect as well - to cause mass to rise, and the earth to slow. But don't expect it to affect your watch during its lifetime. :)
The time delay thing would be because a system already under strain and constantly in a state of strain, becomes more under strain at some position as a result of strain relieving movement elsewhere. That doesn't mean something will happen immediately; it means that it becomes more likely that something will happen in the positions under additional strain; that it now requires less to make those positions ready to give in and move.
I can't say which event causes another. Indeed it might be nearer the truth to say simply that the tectonic situation means that there must always be so much stress, somewhere, and that when it is released in one place it must increase in others so that everything adds up. So not so much this causes that, as all cause all the others. That's my guess; a geologist would give a better analysis.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 09:01 am (UTC)From:I think the earth is changeing before our eyes and we just aren't looking at the evalutional process like we should be.
one thought comes to mind after rereading the above artical. Is that they're pointing out how there hasn't been this kind of sismac activity since 1906. I'm racking my brain trying to remember what the year was that last time this region had a hurrican season like the one we just had. it seems to me it was about the same time. hmm. I think I'll look into that.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 09:59 am (UTC)From:It is only a few hundred years ago that the earth was in a mini ice age, as some have called it; there were times in the 17th and 19th century when the Thames froze over - and when you consider what was flowing in it at the time, that is quite remarkable. So what is different about today? I could only accept that there is global warming if the rate of change is unprecedented. But there is already good reason to deal with fossil fuel technology on other grounds, so why not get started now?
The world is full of things becoming extinct before they are even discovered; and if you are seeing species new to yourself, could this be because
1) habitats are being lost and a brief invasion of displaced creatures is scurrying out into sight
2) there is just so much biodiversity that one cannot help but see some unexpected things turning up in unusual weather?
The only really earth shaking thing that has come up lately from my point of view is the discovery of hobbit sized near humans on Flores in Indonesia, possibly remaining in existence until the last few hundred years - maybe in isolated spots still with us?
Although I am not bothered by evolution from a 'belief' point of view - as I have said in my journal, inspecting the Hebrew shows it is of no importance to belief whether evolution is real or not - I have always, irrespective of belief, had suspicions about accounting for the variation in species by random mutation, on grounds of statistics; and more recently, on grounds of the methodology whereby changes in a species must take place in separate parts of the body, simultaneously, in order to enable a new mode of behaviour that would enable increased likelihood of survival. Maybe someone can show me how evolutionists have tackled those two concerns, but my impression is that they prefer to ignore them.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 10:42 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 11:23 am (UTC)From:Now on the level of bacteria, change is clearly very rapid, and there are very good reasons for that. If I am convinced of evolution in any respect, it is in respect of bacteria. What troubles me is the way in which it would be effective in more complicated organisms, and I am led to believe that the evolution of the primitive cell in the first place is the more remarkable of the things claimed for evolution. About that, I know nothing.
On the larger scale, it is obvious that species optimise themselves within bounds in response to external stimuli - but one should remember there is a way back. Only when it gets irreversible has one really got a new species. For instance the standard illustration of evolution I saw as a child was the changing colours of butterflies and moths for camouflage purposes due to industrialisation. The same species have reversed those changes since the clean air legislation; so really they never changed out of their 'box' at all; they just moved into another part of it, and on reverse of changes in the world, went back to the part of the box they can live in, that they had formerly inhabited. In truth I know enough about the subject only to ask questions, and to know I haven't yet had any sensible answers. They may be out there, but no one has bothered me with them yet. I'm not all that bothered, except as a sort of intellectual toy.