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Mickey Z
Cool Observer
the Department of Homeland Security.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Fault Lines: Real and Imagined
If you’re one of those who rapes the planet (or at least plays a role), the holiday season is a time of bonuses...and long lines at the luxury car dealer. So say the New York Times. (Click “more” at the bottom of this post to read the entire nauseating article.)
If you’re one of those on the receiving end of capitalist predation, well, have a look here to see what you might get:
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=1
Rich or poor, North or South, white or black, we can all count on the randomness of nature to even things out if we don’t. I read an op-ed in the Times today...and have excerpted it below:
“We have a tsunami warning system in the Pacific Ocean because, in recent history, we’ve experienced tsunamis there. We don’t have a similar system in the Indian Ocean. This has something to do with the technologies developing nations can afford, of course, But it also has to do with the fact that our experience with the giant waves in this region is less immediate. Yet the single worst explosion in our known geologic history - an eruption of a 20-by-60-mile caldera some 71,000 years ago - occurred on Sumatra, just 100 miles from the epicenter of Sunday’s earthquake.
The earlier eruption left a 10,000 square-mile sheet of volcanic rock, more than a thousand feet thick, and so filled the sky with ash that it probably created our last ice age. Still, the eastern Indian Ocean is thought to be an area of infrequent tsunami activity. Earthquakes as a rule occur at the ridge of land and water, where plates usually meet and either slide, thrust or pull apart, releasing awesome power. But there are exceptions.”
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“The greatest cliché in geology is the question, Can it happen again? Sure. Will it happen again? Well, nature is never overdue, and we simply don’t know. The earth has had many configurations of land, water and living inhabitants over the ages, and if we think of an earth-changing event as being “overdue,” we are failing to understand geologic time. It is mind-boggling to think that only 200 million years ago the earth was one gigantic continent, and one can only imagine the explosions that broke it into today’s continents. The plates beneath these continents continue to creep, and they don’t need an earthquake to move them along.”
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“Sunday’s tragic earthquake occurred miles beneath the Indian Ocean, and despite its 9.0 magnitude it was hardly felt in Indonesia, and not at all in Sri Lanka. Yet the water displacement caused by the thrusting of the Indian plate beneath the Burma plate created 30-foot waves that were to kill people on the African coast more than 3,000 miles away. This distance may seem hard to believe, but after the Great Chilean Earthquake of 1960, tsunamis traveled more than 6,200 miles to Hilo, Hawaii, where they killed 61 people and destroyed many buildings with waves of more than 35 feet.
“Oddly, a tsunami cannot be felt as it passes ships on the open ocean, for the wave is usually small, one to two feet, and traveling very fast, as fast as airliners. It is only as it approaches shallow water that it begins to break; as the bottom of the wave slows, the top keeps traveling at the higher speed and increases in height, hitting landfall at 30 to 40 miles an hour. In 1958, an earthquake in Lituya Bay, Alaska, caused a landslide into the ocean that created a tsunami 1,720 feet high, a wave that could have swept over the Empire State Building. Fortunately it headed into a wilderness area and did not travel across the ocean to Hawaii or Japan.
“The possibility of great landmasses falling into the ocean is always with us, and recently scientists found vertical fault lines through a volcano on La Palma, one of the smaller and more westward Canary Islands. The volcano has a crater about five miles wide and a half-mile high, and erupts about every 200 years. The last eruption was in 1948, but the newly discovered fault lines have convinced some scientists that eventually the huge crater will break apart and slide into the ocean, bringing more than a half-trillion tons of rock with it.
“Since tsunamis are created in proportion to the amount of land that has fallen into the water, this event would likely create a wave mass never before known to written history, many times bigger than the wave at Lituya Bay. The wave would diminish a little as it crossed the Atlantic, but if it hit the Atlantic Seaboard it could be higher than the skyscrapers of Boston, New York, Washington and Miami. Scientists do not know if it will take one, four, or 10 eruptions to separate the landmass, only that the separation is inevitable.”
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“Big earthquakes occur infrequently, but when they do they usually come unexpectedly and with horrendous power. It is, of course, dangerous to live in an earthquake-prone area, but what area in the world can we say is earthquake-safe? Surely the people in the Mississippi Valley feel they are safe, as do the people in New York City. Yet, New York has a fault line going across 125th Street that I would guess 99 percent of the city’s population does not know about.”
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