The Scariest Earthquake Is Yet to Come
Really Dumb Liberals
come.html
The tsunami that struck Japan was the third in a series of events that now
put California at risk.
All of those broken bones in northern Japan, all of those broken lives and
those broken homes prompt us to remember what in calmer times we are
invariably minded to forget: the most stern and chilling of mantras, which
holds, quite simply, that mankind inhabits this earth subject to
geological consent—which can be withdrawn at any time.
For hundreds, maybe for thousands of people, this consent was withdrawn
with shocking suddenness—all geological events are sudden, and all are
unexpected if not necessarily entirely unanticipated—at 2:46 on this past
clear, cool spring Friday afternoon. One moment all were going about their
quotidian business—in offices, on trains, in rice fields, in stores, in
schools, in warehouses, in shrines—and then the ground began to shake. At
first, the shock was merely a much stronger and longer version of the
temblors to which most Japanese are well accustomed. There came a stunned
silence, as there always does. But then, the difference: a few minutes
later a low rumble from the east, and in a horrifying replay of the Indian
Ocean tragedy of just some six years before, the imagery of which is still
hauntingly in all the world’s mind, the coastal waters off the northern
Honshu vanished, sucked mysteriously out to sea.
The rumbling continued, people then began to spy a ragged white line on
the horizon, and, with unimaginable ferocity, the line became visible as a
wall of waves sweeping back inshore at immense speed and at great height.
Just seconds later and these Pacific Ocean waters hit the Japanese
seawalls, surmounted them with careless ease, and began to claw across the
land beyond in what would become a dispassionate and detached orgy of
utter destruction.
We all now know, and have for 50 years, that geography is the ultimate
reason behind the disaster. Japan is at the junction of a web of tectonic-
plate boundaries that make it more peculiarly vulnerable to ground-shaking
episodes than almost anywhere else—and it is a measure of Japanese
engineering ingenuity, of social cohesion, of the ready acceptance of
authority and the imposition of necessary discipline that allows so many
to survive these all-too-frequent displays of tectonic power.
But geography is not the only factor in this particular and acutely
dreadful event. Topography played an especially tragic role in the story,
too—for it is an axiom known to all those who dwell by high-tsunami-risk
coastlines that when the sea sucks back, you run: you run inland and, if
at all possible, you run uphill. But in this corner of northeast Japan,
with its wide plains of rice meadows and ideal factory sites and
conveniently flat airport locations, there may well be a great deal of
inland—but there is almost no uphill.
Such mountains as exist are far away, blue and distant in the west. All
here is coastal plain. And so the reality is this: if a monstrous wave is
chasing you inland at the speed of a jetliner, and if the flat topography
all around denies you any chance of sprinting to a hilltop to try to
escape its wrath, then you can make no mistake—it will catch you, it will
drown you, and its forces will pulverize you out of all recognition as a
thing of utter insignificance, which of course, to a tsunami, all men and
women and their creations necessarily must be.
Even more worrisome than geography and topography, though, is geological
history. For this event cannot be viewed in isolation. There was a
horrifically destructive Pacific earthquake in New Zealand on Feb. 22, and
an even more violent magnitude-8.8 event in Chile almost exactly a year
before. All three phenomena involved more or less the same family of
circum-Pacific fault lines and plate boundaries—and though there is still
no hard scientific evidence to explain why, there is little doubt now that
earthquakes do tend to occur in clusters: a significant event on one side
of a major tectonic plate is often—not invariably, but often enough to be
noticeable—followed some weeks or months later by another on the plate’s
far side. It is as though the earth becomes like a great brass bell, which
when struck by an enormous hammer blow on one side sets to vibrating and
ringing from all over. Now there have been catastrophic events at three
corners of the Pacific Plate—one in the northwest, on Friday; one in the
southwest, last month; one in the southeast, last year.
That leaves just one corner unaffected—the northeast. And the fault line
in the northeast of the Pacific Plate is the San Andreas Fault,
underpinning the city of San Francisco.
All of which makes the geological community very apprehensive. All know
that the San Andreas Fault is due to rupture one day—it last did so in
1906, and strains have built beneath it to a barely tolerable level. To
rupture again, with unimaginable consequences for the millions who live
above it, some triggering event has to occur. Now three events have
occurred that might all be regarded as triggering events. There are in
consequence a lot of thoughtful people in the American West who are very
nervous indeed—wondering, as they often must do, whether the consent that
permits them to inhabit so pleasant a place might be about to be
withdrawn, sooner than they have supposed.
Dawlish
wrote:
You are probably correct. Why have you posted this to a global warming
newsgroup? A transverse slip of the brain, maybe?
DCI
>
> You are probably correct. Why have you posted this to a global warming
>
> - Show quoted text -
Maybe that Is the worst to come. And if the worst does come, in
another few score of years, somebody else will saying tha same thing.
Do you "warmers" feel very territorial?
DCI