An' Gawd Done Moved the Rocks!

I get up every weekday at 4:40 a.m. By around five I'm sitting at the table in the kitchen, suckin' down my coffee & amaretto and wolfin' down some cereal or toasted waffles or whatever. Takes me about half an hour to eat. I eat slow.
     So there I was, sittin' at the table with my rice crispies last Friday, wondering why the newspaper weren't here yet & reading the back of a cereal box. It was still dark outside but the days before had been nominally warm enough for things to start turning green. And bein' as it was Friday, I was feeling pretty optimistic for a change.
     Somewhere around 4:40 I heard what sounded like a gust of wind.
     Then the house kinda bounced. As if a good wind had come up all of a sudden and struck the side of the house real good before rolling on past.
     I thought about it for a moment, that bounce.
     There was something strangely familiar about it. I'd felt it before, first, and secondly it just seemed like something more easily explainable than blaming it on some stray wind.
     I got up and went into the dining room. The plates on the wall were rattling.
     I looked out the window. Then I made a cognitive decision.
     The bounce was the P-wave.
     The rattling plates was S-wave.
     It was an earthquake. That's why it was so familiar. After forty-odd years I could still tell you what it was, even if I only learned about it in geology class and came to experience it later when I was in the USN. Puerto Rico sits on the Puerto Rican trench, a subduction zone that forms a crescent under the Atlantic that marks the ring of island that stretch from Cuba eastward and south to the coast of Brazil.

I went upstairs and googled earthquakes in North America and ended up on the USGS website. There it was, marked out in all its beauty by some seismologist. A R5.2 level quake, 11 km below the surface, near the Indiana/Illinois state line around Bellmont, Illinois. And right there, under the listing was a little link marked "Did you feel it?"
     Yeah, I thought. I did feel it. I clicked the link, put down my experience in words and noted that I was going to check on the chart recorder at the university's geology department after I was at work.
     When I clicked on the report invitation, there was a single page of reports. By the time I clicked back to the list of reports there were three pages. I went downstairs, finished breakfast, brushed my teeth and went back upstairs. Now there were over 20 pages of reports. I went in the bedroom and checked to see if Cid was awake. Barely. She asked me what was up.
     "You didn't feel the earthquake?"
     "No. Was there one?"
     "Yeah. Earth doesn't move for you any more?"
     "Not without some help."
     I went back into my office and looked at the reports page. Now there were nearly 40 reports, some close in to the epicenter, the rest out as far as Ohio & West Virginia..
     I got my act together, went downstairs & grabbed my lunch and bag. Outside the birds were busily chirping at each other. The cats were looking at me funny. I fed 'em, got in my car and went to work.

When I was a kid there were earthquakes in Hawaii and Alaska and such. Never really knew about earthquakes back then. Stuff happened. I could still watch Tom Corbett & His Space Cadets on the old Sylvania B&W. The nuns were mean as snakes, the pope was some austere dude lived in the Vatican. Sometimes there'd be a real bad storm and my folks would hustle me and Sis into the hallway or down to the basement but I don't remember a single person talking about earthquakes as local events. The Midwest was geological stable as far as I knew or heard. No problem.
     I knew about earthquakes only from school textbooks or hearing some someone who'd been in California. I got through all twelve grades of school before college without so much as a giggle in my brain even thinking of earthquakes at all. And even after that I didn't think much about it.
     About the second year of college I ended up interested in rocks and earth science. Not as a real science but just something to take. Geology. Invertibrate paleontology. Sedimentary environments. Physical geology. The usual stuff.
     But there was this new subject, plate tectonics. Sounded interesting. I signed up.
     Now you have to remember: in 1966 the idea of continental drift was a hypothesis. It wasn't a theory or a pile of serious laws of physics. It was a hypothesis that happened to be part of the program. The professor, Ben Richard, was a young guy with new ideas and a very personable teaching style. I learned about the angle of repose. I learned about mountain chains being part of a huge collection of encounters between large blocks of pretty much solid & unchanging planks of the planets surface. And I learned a bit about the idea of deep time, by which most humans without any time to think about it often get the idea that just 'cause it ain't moving fast right now, it probably won't move fast in the future. Or the past.
     And there was a field trip too.
     Back before satellite pictures of topography or such, the garden variety way for geology students to pick up on how plate tectonics works was to stand on one side of a valley with an open rock face before their eyes. Taking human imagination for what it's worth, the student then looks across the valley to see a similar band of rock on another exposed rock face in the distance.
     You look at any Grand Canyon shot & you'll see the layers of rock echoed across the gorges and washouts. That's how it works. Here is rock A. There, over there across the valley you can see rock A". Sweet.
     At one point in the field trip we were standing on the side of a road in Virginia. Directly in front of us was a rock fact that rose some sixty feet into the air. Running across the face of the rock was a unique pattern. Rubbed one way, the surface was rough. Rubbed the opposite direction, the surface was stippled but otherwise smooth. The face of rock before us had been broken and shoved up into the air by geological forces. Tectonic activity. Mountain building.
     We were standing on one side of a fault line and staring at the face of the other side of the fault line. Our side of the mountain had either dropped or had stood its ground and the other side of the mountain, the face of rock before us, had either moved up relative to the other side of the faultline or it had stood its ground and our side of the mountain had dropped. The rough/smooth test told us which side moved which direction.
     And the time it took to move that rock sixty-odd feet in the air?
     Maybe months. Maybe centuries. But the pattern on the rock before us told us a simple possible answer to the question of how long. It had all happened at once, boom. Just like that. Maybe just over a few weeks or less, worst case scenario.

There have been twenty-six seismic events in the direct vicinity of the event last Friday (as of 21 April, 2008), near Bellmont, Illinois. Twenty-six bumps and grinds of the earth in an area about the distance between Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio over the past five days. The Richter scale values for these events vary between the 5.2 that started the shakin' and Sunday evening's event at 1.0. The first one was felt by folks as far east as West Virginia and as far south as the middle of Georgia. The reported disturbance of human life varied between zilch to R2 or R3.
     I only really felt the first one. I kinda stopped paying attention after that because, well, I stopped paying attention. Such complacency does have its merits. This way I'm not standing around, nervously waiting for the next shoe to drop. And given the exponential method of the Richter scales I doubt if I'd notice anything less than the slight bump and rattle that I experienced Friday morning as the cereal went limp.
     The lesson isn't missed on me, however. I've always paid attention to the signs, even if they were arcane little flutters of the ground. And sitting as I do on the disbelieving bench, I look at things like earthquakes and volcanoes & the like as hints to the seriously ephemeral nature of all life.
     It could end any time, this paradise.
     The five things that give life a chance on this little speck in the middle of nowhere special are really simple good fortunes.
     The planet happens to be in just the right orbit (right now) for generally comfortable conditions. We're not too far and we're not too close to the sun and the planet's tilted just enough to modulate the weather so we have seasons.
     There's liquid water in a large amount (right now) to support life.
     There's a breathable atmosphere (right now) with just the right ratio of the right molecules to interact with the carbon-based life that's around (right now).
     And the planet has a molten core & active geology, which keeps the environment moving around, which stresses the life forms to evolve. The active geology also leads to the existence of a magnetic field, which protects the surface from nasty rays from space as well as holding off the solar wind so the oceans and atmosphere don't get blown away by the solar wind.
     You want a comparison?
     There's earth with exactly those five things and there's Mars with barely one (the distance from the sun) and none of the other four, especially a magnetic field.
     Mars is a dead subject.
     Earth has life.
     And as part of the bargain, we get interesting geological activity, which makes us pause now and then after the house bumps and the plates rattle to think of how little it would take for all of this – ALL of this – to disappear in a puff.
     Not that it makes the rattling plates and the bouncing house any easier to take. After all, if the earthquake that everyone is agonizing over or trying very hard to ignore the predictions about ever does take up course in the middle of the North American continent, living in a tiny village in Ohio isn't going to mean much.
     All of the possibilities are thus aggravated by the severity of the fault structure and how long nothing's happened around there. But even more important in figuring what might happen next is the simple increase in global population.
     Back when the New Madrid fault did its last big dance – around 1895 – there were much fewer humans hanging around. The global population back then is estimated to have been around one billion. Not much more than that. Now there are nearly seven billion of us crammed into the space barely able to support much less than two billion, at most. That many folks take up a lot of space & because the space they're occupying doesn't give a rat's ass one way or the other to how many there are or how high quality their lives might be, even a modest earthquake (like the one last Friday) is going to get more notice and cause more trouble.
     So in the middle of the messed up windows and the broken plates and the fallen bricks and the need for reinforcement of the kitchen floor, there's the extreme likelihood that last Friday's event wouldn't have caused much damage in a world of half as many people or less.
     Those who suffer in any way from the earthquake can blame it on their neighbors or on the government for not letting them know that this might have happened. Or they can complain to their favorite imaginary friend and beg him or her not to send any more destruction and misery their way.
     Or they can pick up and go on, knowing that it's all gonna end eventually some day, one way or the other. Eventually the continents will drift back together. Eventually the churning core of this planet will cool its jets and the magnetic field will collapse. Eventually the sun will run out of fuel. Eventually there won't be anything here in this corner of the universe but a blue cloud of disturbed gasses and maybe a handful of cinders & rocks.

Of course thinking this way doesn't sound very optimistic. Talking about the eventual demise of the solar system and the galaxy and our self-absorbed, self-important little brief snatches of life in the vast deepness of time isn't the kind of thing people want to hear. They'd rather talk about an imaginary friend and trust the words in a book of dubious parentage and provenance.
     "Don't tell me that we're running out of water. Jesus is coming back and we won't have to worry about a thing, those of us who have faith in the Lord God Jehovah and the redemption of the blood!"
     Sorry, it don't work that way.
     Science shows us with a definitely more focused eye what's happened in the past and leads us to understand the possibilities of the future in a world that is quite unavoidably real, physically present, a place & time that we can touch & feel and occupy every sense.
     Religion tries to tell us – in a language and with metaphors no better than a child's imaginings – that we're going to live forever.
     As if we could stop – or some imaginary roaring thunderer will stop – what's going to happen next. Ain't nobody that powerful. The rocks prove that.

If you listen real good you can even hear 'em sing. Lot easier to hear than that voice of god you've been waiting for all these millenia.