January 10, 2001

Please remain calm during the earthquakes

While you slept last week, and while you were awake as well, highly sophisticated machinery was keeping track of earthquakes in California and elsewhere. Though you probably felt none, there were hundreds, all over the state. Most of them were so small they weren't felt even at the epicenters, except perhaps, by the same princess who had the problem with that pea in the children's fairy tale.

I've been very vaguely aware of all these little quakes for years. Now, thanks to the internet, I can satisfy my curiosity about them by checking the USGS website every day or two if I wish. It doesn't take long to realize there's a steady, slow drumbeat of earthquakes, 1.9, 1.5, 2.7, 2.0 on the Richter scale. Every so often one registers 3 or 4 or so, totaling several each week. One day recently a whole series in that range shook up Burney, in the northeast corner of California.

Because my brother lives in Humboldt County near the triple junction, where the Pacific plate, North American plate and Gorda plate come together, I'm particularly aware of quakes near Cape Mendocino, south of Eureka. That ruggedly beautiful area of California gets a lot of quakes. My brother got his 15 minutes of fame when he was quoted on the front pages of hundreds of newspapers about one nasty quake which hit Ferndale and the Lost Coast area particularly hard several years ago. He and his wife had just driven into Ferndale to attend a funeral when the quake hit. The joke was that the man being honored with the memorial service had not wanted one, and the quake was his way of making that point.

That particular quake also raised the whole area near Cape Mendocino by a foot or two. On that sparsely settled coast no one would have noticed except that the creatures who'd been living quite comfortably in the intertidal zone were suddenly thrust above it, and their lives were disrupted. If they were mobile, like crabs, they had no problem, but anemones, mussels, and other settled residents attuned to the daily, weekly, and monthly variations of the tidal flux suddenly found themselves in a different reality, and most of them died. They were like store owners in a small town when Wal-Mart or Home Depot shows up to compete for the available customers.

While small quakes are common all over California, it's near U.S. 395 on the east side of the Sierra that most of them occur. Names like Coso Junction, Lone Pine, Tom's Place, Bishop, Mammoth Lakes, Ridgecrest, Ludlow and Obsidian Butte recur each week in the listings.

If small quakes predict big quakes, I'd have to guess that two or three of the next five big ones will be in places like Death Valley or Independence, or perhaps, Carson City. I don't wish anyone ill, but if we're going to have major earthquakes in this state, I'd prefer they shake up abalones and Bristle Cone Pines rather than Highway One or Pier 39.

It's a fact, one not fully realized by anyone until recent decades, that California would not exist without tens of thousands of past earthquakes, large and small. Pacifica, San Francisco, and the whole state in which we live was primarily sculpted by earthquake, fire, volcanic eruption, storm and flood. What we think of as disasters created the beauty that surrounds us. Those same forces will continue to modify our surroundings. Cope!

Paul Azevedo has a new e mail address, thereactor@earthlink.net, and a new website listing, http://home.earthlink.net/~thereactor/