Here’s my true confession: I went through a great many years as uninformed about really important stuff as most of us are. It took me a long time to acquire a basic understanding of the planet we live on.
Born in Hollywood, California (which didn’t really exist until 2005, when Los Angeles officially recognized it as a distinct neighborhood), my widowed mother and I lived in Burbank. In our frequent trips to the beach or, more often, to the orthodontist’s office in Beverly Hills, I looked longingly at the beautiful houses perched on or near the tops of the hills along our route. One day, after a particularly rainy “monsoon season,” I noticed that most of the houses on one hill were gone, and the ground upon which they had stood was bare of not just the houses, but all vegetation as well.
Over time, I began to notice that new homes were being built on the same ground that had collapsed. I asked mom if the new houses would slide down the hill too. “Probably, sooner or later,” she told me.
“Why,” I asked, “do they do that if they know the houses will slide down the hill again?”
Beyond some mildly rude comments about the intelligence of the builders' decisions, she had no answer for me. This precocious kid pondered the weighty question for many years. Mom’s answer would have to suffice for a while.
Earthquakes were just part of life in southern California. At the time of the Arvin-Tehachapi earthquake [magnitude 7.7] in 1952, mom and I were sharing a bedroom—twin beds; wheels on the bed frame resting on the polished wood floor. It was close enough to Los Angeles that we certainly felt it. I wasn’t afraid. But I was startled when, in the middle of the night, both beds started rolling around in what I remember as circles on the wood floor. Actually, I thought it was a kind of fun ride! Mom stayed calm and told me to stay in bed until the shaking stopped.
Smaller earthquakes and barely detectable tremors were not unusual. The Arvin-Tehachapi quake was just more spectacular. Of course, we had regular earthquake drills in school so I was aware of the possibility. Over the years, I became quite good at predicting earthquakes. I know scientists have studied why animals and some people know when an earthquake is imminent, but have no idea whether they’ve ever been able to fully explain it. There’s just something about the air… animals behave strangely, it seems to be quieter, more still, thicker, heavier than usual…
In the mid-1970s, I worked for a non-profit company that published scientific journals. My only job was transcribing tapes dictated by scientists, who usually had thick foreign accents. Some tapes were index entries of chemicals compounds; others were abstracts of studies and papers on a variety of subjects, including nuclear power plants. That was more than thirty years ago, and what I learned was shocking and terrifying. There were articles about the cracks in the buildings containing the nuclear reactors; malfunctioning equipment; human errors; etc. I don’t remember all the problems the abstracts addressed or whether remedies were proposed. My takeaway: using nuclear power to generate electricity was scary and possibly had been undertaken prematurely, before anybody actually knew what they were doing, or understood the consequences of not getting it right the first time.
In the late 1970s, my husband applied for and got a job in Denver as a music teacher. In 1980, I applied for and got a clerical job in a division office of a major oil company. I would be working with geologists and geophysicists, about whom I knew a little less than nothing. I couldn’t imagine what they did or, for that matter, what I would be doing. I found out very quickly.
I worked in the Western Division, where the primary mission was to identify possible oil reserves, propose drilling the most promising ones, buy land leases, and track the day-to-day details of the drilling. My first assignment was to retype an edited manual for newly hired, fresh out of college geoscientists. They came to the job knowledgeable about geology, but with no idea about how to explore for oil then get it out of the ground, despite their masters or doctorate degrees. The manual I retyped was a review of some basic geology concepts, and a lot about how to apply what they learned in school to the work the company expected of them.
Something I’ve always really enjoyed about typing or editing other people’s stuff is that I learn a lot from it. Typing that manual taught me about something I had never thought about: how dynamic our little corner of the universe, our ‘blue’ planet, really is. I was off and running. And I was in love. With geology.
As quickly as I could find a school to attend and get my request for tuition reimbursement approved, I enrolled. The only boring required class I took was statistical analysis. Otherwise… well, let’s just say that my love affair with the subject has never diminished. Within three months in my new job, I was promoted to geological technician.
In school, I learned about paleogeography; about plate tectonics and how the original land mass split apart and drifted around the planet to form continents familiar to us today; and how some plates collided into others to form mountain ranges like the Himalayas. We studied volcanoes and how eruptions and shifting plates formed the Hawaiian islands. In other words, I learned how dynamic and ever-changing this little planet is.
Because the school was located at the foot of the eastern slope of the Front Range of the Rocky mountains, just east of the Hogback, we were only minutes and a short bus ride away from mini-field trips where we could see and touch much of what we had read about in class. We went on longer field trips, and hiked to the top of a few mountains to see stromatolites up-close and personal. We traveled the state to see the sand dunes, search for fossils, explore marble quarries. We panned for gold and peeked into a tiny hole where we could see rubies ‘growing.’ It was one of the most exciting learning experiences I’ve ever had, and I’ve had a few!
One unanticipated payoff: now, whether I’m flying or driving cross-country, I have an infinitely better understanding of what I’m looking at and what earth forces made it look that way. And recently, our little planet has been an excellent reminder of how dynamic it can be.
I’ve watched the events in Japan with horror about the magnitude of the damage from the main shock and the aftershocks and, of course, the unbelievable power of the tsunami. Unlike people in other recent natural disasters, the Japanese people understand that help is on the way, but are surprised and grateful when teams from the U.S. and around the world actually show up to help them. They have suffered horribly, but wait patiently—the pain of missing loved ones obvious in their faces. There does not seem to be much, if any, looting or violence. They are desperate but quiet in their desperation. They have my utmost respect.
But always in a tiny corner in the back of my mind is my limited knowledge of geology and first-hand knowledge of geoscientists, and I share some of what their reactions must be. They are as horrified by the events as anyone, and I would bet money that the nuclear physicists and nuclear reactor designers are significantly less calm than they appear to be during the endless appearances on our 24-hour news broadcasts. They may have ideas of how to do something about the four possible meltdowns and increasing levels of radiation released into the atmosphere, but they don’t really know what to do about it. It’s a learning experience for them too.
For the earth scientists, at least, there is a bit of a conflict too. I saw it first-hand when Mount St. Helens blew exactly eighteen days after I started my job. I, innocent that I was, was horrified—both by the eruption and by the reaction of the scientists with whom I worked. They love to see this stuff when it actually happens. Until then, they can only theorize about it, and examine the results of similar events that happened eons ago. If they can’t see it in person, they can watch it from all angles, on video, analyze what happened and, with luck, eventually understand enough to predict future events. They may be as horrified by the event, but they’re thrilled with the new knowledge it makes possible
No one understands enough about earthquakes yet to predict when they might happen. The best they can do is estimate the probably of one along a certain known fault within x number of years, based on studies of core samples taken from known active faults and the time intervals between earthquakes in the past. The San Andreas Fault in California might experience a major quake in the next thirty years, for example.
The recent events in New Zealand, in Chile, in Haiti remind me of the consequences of some of our actions, things like building homes over and over again on hills that collapse over and over again. Or building nuclear power plants directly over identified major faults, or in Japan—one of the most active, earthquake-prone, heavily populated places on earth.
When we do things like forgetting our history (or, in this case, our planet’s history), the nuclear power experts build the highest concentration of nuclear facilities in the U.S. within five to six or seven hundred miles of a major earthquake fault in the heartland, the New Madrid fault, that produced several powerful earthquakes in 1811 and 1812. The largest of them rang church bells on the east coast!
Something else I pay attention to are expert opinions. In everything from technology to the food we eat to religious beliefs, there are experts that believe they have the final word on… pick your topic. They believed that the earth was flat; that the sun circled the earth; that plagues and epidemics were God’s punishment for evil. In the time of Columbus, they believed that they could reach China by sailing directly west out of Spain. They believed that Earth was the only planet in the heavens and the moon and stars were there for navigation; to signal monsoon and planting seasons; and to light the night skies.
Whether we’re talking about geosciences, prescription drugs, earthquakes, or nuclear power plants, I simply do not believe that we know everything there is to know about much of anything. And even if we did, we live in a society that is reactive, not proactive. That means that here in the U.S., with our current political mess, we will wait until after a major earthquake or other catastrophic event kills hundreds or thousands of people, or causes meltdowns in our own nuclear power plants, before we seriously consider fixing infrastructure that could have prevented horrendous problems if done in a timely manner.
But politics is politics and politicians’ priorities have little or nothing to do with keeping our country, its economy, or its people safe. Don’t be looking for anything proactive unless or until the conditions in our country become more important than the self-interests of elected officials.
As of this morning, I learned about the steps taken in other countries to shut down some nuclear power plants, or at least take preventative measures before problems arise. In the U.S., our elected officials don’t want us to make snap judgments about their desire to build more nuclear power plants… You can almost hear them assuring us that “it could never happen here.” They seem to have forgotten Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and will no doubt forget Japan just as quickly. After all, the big power companies that seem to own so many of them want it that way. Personal power and money trump all.
