[Mb-civic] Whistling Past the Fault Line - George F. Will - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Whistling Past the Fault Line

By George F. Will
Tuesday, October 11, 2005; Page A17

Earth, that living, seething, often inhospitable and not altogether 
intelligently designed thing, has again shrugged, and tens of thousands 
of Pakistanis are dead. That earthquake struck 10 months after an 
undersea quake caused the December 2004 tsunami that killed 285,000 in 
Asia. Americans reeling from Hurricane Katrina, and warned of scores of 
millions of potential deaths from avian flu, have a vague feeling -- 
never mind the disturbing rest of the news -- of pervasive menace from 
things out of control. Too vague, according to Simon Winchester.

His timely new book, "A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the 
Great California Earthquake of 1906," teaches -- reminds, really -- that 
we should have quite precise worries about the incurably unstable ground 
on which scores of millions of Americans live. This almost certainly 
will result in a huge calamity, probably in the lifetime of most people 
now living.

Before the study of plate tectonics revolutionized geology just 40 years 
ago, that science, Winchester writes, was concerned with "rocks, 
fossils, faults and minerals that were scattered around simply and 
solely on the surface of the earth." But the surface consists of between 
-- depending how they are defined -- six and 36 floating plates, which 
Winchester calls "rafts of solid rock." The plates' slow movements are 
powered by Earth's molten innards, the boiling and bubbling radioactive 
residue of the planet's formation 4.5 billion years ago.

The plates grind against -- and slide up on, or plunge below -- one 
another. But not smoothly, which is the lethal problem. When friction 
freezes them for a while, stupendous energy builds up until, suddenly, 
plates unlock and the energy is released, sometimes in ways that seem to 
involve related spasms around the world.

On the last day of January 1906, that seismically dangerous year, an 
earthquake in Ecuador and Colombia of perhaps 8.8 magnitude on the 
Richter scale killed about 2,000. Sixteen days later there was a large 
Caribbean quake, followed five days later by one in the Caucasus, and on 
March 17 by one that killed 1,228 on the island of Formosa. On April 6 a 
10-day eruption of the volcano Vesuvius began with rocks blown 40,000 
feet into the air over Naples. Two days after Vesuvius subsided, San 
Francisco was knocked down, and 2,600 acres of it were then devoured by 
three days of fires. About 3,000 San Franciscans died then, four months 
before a Chilean quake killed 20,000.

San Francisco's quake was smaller than the series of shocks around New 
Madrid, Mo., over a few winter weeks in 1811-12. They were strong enough 
to ring the bells in a Charleston, S.C., church that was later destroyed 
in that city's 1886 quake. Scores of millions of Americans now live on 
the unstable faults that shook mid-America in 1811-12.

For San Francisco, the bad news is that the quake that killed 63 in 1989 
(6.9 magnitude, compared with 8.3 in 1906) was caused not by the San 
Andreas fault but by a neighboring one. So the big menace, the San 
Andreas, has not recently lurched, as it surely will because it is 
moving, sporadically, in grinding concert with the Pacific Plate. Since 
1906 there have been only five major earthquakes along the 750 miles of 
the San Andreas, and none in Northern California. The U.S. Geological 
Survey estimates a 62 percent probability of a quake in that area of at 
least 6.7 magnitude before 2032. Pondering the prosperous town of 
Portola Valley, south of San Francisco, exactly astride two of the most 
active strands of the San Andreas, Winchester, like many geologists who 
have warned the town, is fascinated by "humankind's insistent folly in 
living in places where they shouldn't."

After Earth's heavings subside, they reverberate in people's minds. 
Winchester says that after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake killed 60,000, 
"priests roved around the ruins, selecting at random those they believed 
guilty of heresy and thus to blame for annoying the Divine, who in turn 
had ordered up the disaster. The priests had them hanged on the spot."

The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in what is now Indonesia fueled the growth 
of an extremist strain of Islam, bent on purging society of impurities 
displeasing to God. That strain has twice recently been heard from in Bali.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/10/AR2005101001168.html?nav=hcmodule
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