Its Really Been That Long? 30th Anniversary of the Loma Prieta Earthquake on Thursday

It's Earth Science Week, and "Geoscience is for Everyone" is the theme for this year. Geoscience IS for everyone, because geology dominates the lives of everyone. No one can escape it, for better or worse. Better, when we find inspiration in the awesome forces that have made our planet, and worse for the geologic hazards that exist everywhere on the planet in one form or another. Here in California, one of the premier hazards are the earthquakes that occur here with disturbing irregularity (it would be so much nicer if they followed schedules so we could prepare). I'm writing about the anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake a few days early, but we had two moderate earthquakes in less than 24 hours in Northern California (magnitude 4.5 and 4.7), so seismic things are on my mind.

Two good-sized earthquakes as recorded at Modesto Junior College

We can only share our stories to keep that knowledge at the forefront that will allow us to survive and recover from the major earthquakes to come. Here's my story from 1989, when my teaching career was just beginning.

No, this isn't what happens (credit: A. June)

On October 17th, 1989 at 5:04 PM, my physical geology laboratory had just finished and almost everyone had gone home to watch the World Series. A couple of students were helping me (it was Maureen and Sonny; funny how I remember the names of the first students I had better than the ones I had last semester). We were 100 kilometers from the epicenter, so when the seismic waves started to shake our building, the movement was a strong rolling motion instead of sharp vibrations. We looked at swaying TV monitors, and commented that it was an earthquake. It was a most scholarly discussion, actually. We realized the shaking was not stopping, and we thought we could sense the direction of the quake as well. We started to guess where it might be happening, but when the shaking reached the 40 second mark (the energy was spreading out, it lasted only 10 seconds or so near the epicenter), we realized it was a major event, and that fatalities were probably occurring (and unfortunately we were right). The deodar trees out the window were whipping back and forth as if they were in a high wind. The strangest part for me was the unconscious decision I was making as the shaking progressed. Despite having a quiet scholarly discussion, my body was moving from the front of the podium to the back, where there was a nice solid space to hide under. I would have dived under if the quake had lasted any longer.

Well, this can happen, but most people survive, even in the worst of quakes (credit: A. June)

In hindsight, I should have been a bit more aggressive about taking shelter under the desk. An analysis of our building a year or two later revealed an architectural weakness that suggested the building could collapse if the seismic waves hit it from a particular direction. A seismic retrofit a decade later included some massive shear walls in the lab I taught in.

Meanwhile, at the city library, my children were making me proud. At the time of the quake, there were huge sailing ship models on display, in some cases right on top of the book stacks. The stacks were not reinforced or braced, so there was a real potential for injuries if the quake was strong enough to knock those stacks over. I was told that most people were just standing there watching the bookstacks swaying, but my kids, my well-trained and intelligent kids were the only people in the room to take shelter under the sturdy study tables. Luckily, as I said before, we were on the fringes of the effects of the earthquake and no one was hurt.

The double-decker freeway in Oakland. It was not designed for the amount of shaking that occurred.

The Loma Prieta earthquake, a magnitude 6.9 event at a depth of 11 miles, was a tragedy: 63 people died, and 3,700 were injured. If the World Series game between the A's and the Giants hadn't been about to start, the death toll would have been much higher. Traffic was stunningly light that afternoon. Despite this, the Bay Area was in chaos for days, and months passed before life got back to normal. We were on the fringes, so instead of pain and suffering, we had a profound learning experience that was remembered by my students for the next decade and a half. But it has been 30 years now, and many of my students weren't born when the quake happened. Few of them have felt a quake at all. The large quakes like Loma Prieta and Northridge are ancient history, and there is less of that innate knowledge of what they should do when one hits. Few admit to having any kind of emergency kits at home, and they have no plan for what to do when the next big one hits.

Fault studies across California make it clear that more big tremors are coming, almost surely within the next decade or two. We educators must keep these past events alive in the minds of our students so they will be ready for these events when they come.

This is an abridged version of a blogpost from 2009.

Earth as Inspiration: The Exploring of Beautiful Places.

There was a very intense meeting that took place in the NASA offices almost half a century ago. The Apollo 15 mission was practically all planned out, but they could not decide where to land on the Moon. The crux of the problem was that three previous missions had been successes, but there would only be three more missions, and some technicians were advocating for another landing on the "safe" lunar plains near a crater and some possible volcanic features. Others were arguing for a more daring landing, near the Moon's Apennine Mountains and the Hadley Rill. It was a potentially hazardous landing, in part because NASA didn't have high quality images of the proposed site. The final decision was strongly influenced by mission commander Dave Scott.

Source: NASA

His decision was based in large part on the geology field training that he had received from geologist Leon Silver of Caltech. The moment was dramatized in Tom Hanks' incredible HBO mini-series From the Earth to the Moon:

"...but from what I've learned out in the field; Hadley Apennine, with it's complex variety of features, both impact and volcanic, is the best choice for putting together a picture of how the moon came to be. Maybe a little riskier...but... also the Apennines have something else... Grandeur. And I believe there's something to be said for... exploring beautiful places... It's good for the spirit."

And what he said (in the screenplay anyway) is true. It's good for the spirit to explore the beautiful places. And so it seemed fitting that I would end Earth Science Week by taking my students to a place of grandeur to learn some basics about the Earth: subduction zones, plutonic rocks, glaciers, flooding, and mass-wasting. We headed out to Yosemite Valley. It's a no-brainer kind of choice. We've got fascinating geology all around us here in California, but sometimes it can be a bit tricky to inspire the desire to learn geology by showing the students an outcrop of part of an ophiolite in a dry dusty canyon in the Coast Ranges somewhere. It can be done, mind you, and I've done such trips with reasonable success, but when you live just 90 minutes from one of the most beautiful national parks in the world, you take advantage of that fact!

We did the trip on Friday because Yosemite is, besides being very beautiful, very popular. Four million people visit the park each year, and most of them come on weekends. Our Saturday field trips in recent years have been nightmares of logistics with heavy traffic, long wait lines at the park entrance and problems trying to find parking spaces. Yesterday the valley was pretty quiet, with trams running half-empty (except when my whole class invaded one of them) and no waiting at the entrance station. I sent the students forth to do some research on their own for a few hours and commenced a journey from one end of the valley (sort of) to the other (Yosemite Lodge to Happy Isles).

Since I moved to Central California 30 years ago, I've visited the park more than a hundred times, and I never fail to be inspired by the dramatic in-your-face geology: 3,000 foot cliffs of granitic, high waterfalls (in season), colorful vegetation (again, in season), and interesting birds and animals. It is a wonderful place to learn some basic geological principles.

I wish it were possible for everyone to see the incredible beauty that surrounds our mean grubby cities. So many people are more concerned about getting food and shelter than they are for learning about their planet, a problem of human existence that is completely understandable. But that is the real value and potential of the internet: anyone can experience these places through the eyes and words of others. Earth Science Week is about our awakening to the incredible planet that we live on, a place of great beauty, but at times a place of great danger. Our lives are enriched by learning about both of these things.

Earth as Inspiration: Mt. Shasta for Earth Science Week, October 14-20

Mt. Shasta and Shastina from the north

I usually don't need an inspiration to write about Mt. Shasta, but I realized (two days in) that October 14-20 is national Earth Science week, and the theme of the celebration this year is "Earth as Inspiration". In case you have not yet realized this yet, but I am in fact inspired by the Earth. It started early on in my life with family vacations to some stunning places in California and the American Southwest, continued with scouting experiences nearly every weekend in my teens that included extensive work with topographic maps, and right into my college major and subsequent career as a geology professor. And then I found the form of story-telling called blogging in 2008.

Panther Meadows at the 8,000 foot level on Mt. Shasta

Mt. Shasta is an earthly inspiration. We visited two weeks ago as part of our field course on California's volcanoes. The stops included a drive to the end of the highway at Panther Meadows at 8,000 feet on the side of the 14,179 foot high volcano, and another stop on the north flank where we could see the glaciers and one other astounding feature of the volcano (mentioned below). Shasta is the second tallest volcano (behind Mt. Rainier) but is the most voluminous composite cone (stratovolcano) in the range (I'm parsing words here; there is a larger volcano, but it is of a different kind and will be discussed in a future blog). As a classic composite cone, it is composed of the remains of at least four previous incarnations, capped by the current active vent, Hotlum Cone. The oldest lava and ash dates back to around 600,000 years ago, but the youngest is a mere couple of hundred years. It likely erupted in 1786.

As the highest mountain in Northern California, it supports seven glaciers. Whitney Glacier, with a length of two miles, is the longest in the state (below). The glaciers are responsible for one of Shasta's unique hazards: jokulhlaups! These are floods caused when meltwater is sealed underneath the glacial ice which then breaks out in a catastrophic manner. Although caused by eruptions under the glacial ice in places like Iceland, those that occur on Shasta can happen almost any time. They are generally more of a nuisance, messing up roads and bridges, rather than a killer.

The biggest dangers of a volcano like Shasta are volcanic mudflows (lahars), and hot ash flow eruptions. Lava flows, unless they interact with the ice, are of a lesser concern. Andesite lava has a pasty consistency and is not likely to flow overly far from vents on the mountain. Lahars are of the greater concern, as they are capable of producing massive casualties and structural damage. The towns of Mt. Shasta, Weed, and McCloud are constructed on old lahar deposits. Major events could cause the closure of Interstate 5. Hot Pompeii-style ash eruptions are somewhat less likely, based on the previous history of the volcano.

Whitney Glacier, the largest in California

One of the most outrageous landscapes to be found anywhere on the planet lies to the north of Mt. Shasta. When compiling geologic maps of the region in the 1970s, geologists weren't sure how to interpret the vast region extending north from the mountain reaching 28 miles to the edge of the village of Yreka. It was a hummocky landscape, made of hundreds of small hills and cones of lava fragments with intervening hollows, some containing lakes and ponds. Was it some kind of odd field of cinder cones? It didn't make a lot of sense until the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980.

The St. Helens eruption was initiated when an earthquake caused the entire north flank of the volcano to collapse in a gigantic debris avalanche that traveled for twelve miles down the Toutle River valley. Humans had never witnessed a landslide so large. It uncapped the volcano, leading to the very explosive ash eruption that followed.

To the geologists studying the region around Shasta, it was a revelation. The avalanche at St. Helens formed hundreds of hummocks similar to those found at Shasta. It quickly became clear that the deposit on the north flank of Shasta was the remains of a gigantic debris avalanche. The St. Helens avalanche involved less than a cubic mile of material (0.67 cubic miles), but the now-apparent debris avalanche at Shasta was ten times larger (about 6.5 cubic miles), and it traveled twice as far. It seems to have happened between 360,000 and 300,000 years ago. It's stunning just to image seeing something like this happen.

What aspects of the Earth do you find inspiring?

Kick Off Earth Science Week with Wild Planet Day, Saturday October 8

For my Modesto area readers...

Earth Science Week starts on October 9 and runs through October 15 and lots of activities will be taking place all over the country. Here in Modesto you have a chance to get a jump on the festivities by attending a great science event at Modesto Junior College tomorrow on October 8. In addition to all the wildlife related events (see the press release below), the MJC Geology Club and Department will be offering activities including mineral identification, stream tables, geology by microscope, and displays will include a working seismometer, and fossils, including dinosaur bone, shark teeth, mammoth bones, and our rarely seen sabertooth cat. We will also be giving away free rock, mineral, and fossil samples for those who want to get a collection started!

Check the press release below on this great event!

"Wild Planet Day" Science Fest to be held at MJC

 

The Modesto Junior College Great Valley Museum and Science, Mathematics and Engineering Division are hosting a family oriented Science Fest with the theme “Wild Planet Day” on Saturday, October 8 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The event will take place in and around the Science Building on the corner of College and Coldwell Avenues on East Campus. Admission for the day is $8 per person or $25 per family of 4, with no admission charged for children under 3 years old.

This fun-filled fest will include live animal presentations, hands-on science labs, telescope and planetarium viewing and geocaching, a popular hide-and-seek game using global positioning system (GPS) devices. Participants can observe a wildlife show featuring a kangaroo, eagle and monkey, live reptile presentation or wild animals from the Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center. There will be squid and owl pellet dissection, pumpkin carving and 4-H animals. Science enthusiasts can enjoy over 30 fascinating hands-on science labs including DNA extraction and make-your-own-lung.

The event is a fundraiser for the Great Valley Museum, a non-profit foundation dedicated to providing science and natural history information to adults and children of all ages through classes, programs and exhibits. The museum serves the families of Stanislaus, San Joaquin, and surrounding counties. For more information on the Science Fest call (209) 575-6739.

The World is Going to End in 2012! Uh...Random Thoughts for Earth Science Week

"But most archaeologists, astronomers and Maya say the only thing likely to hit Earth is a meteor shower of New Age philosophy, pop astronomy, Internet doomsday rumors and TV specials..."

This was my second favorite quote from this story on the Mayan calendar ending in 2012. My favorite is that of a Mayan Indian elder, Apolinario Chile Pixtun: "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."

The problem, of course is that someone gets it in their head that a Nostrodamus prediction, or some scriptural prophecy is about to come true, and there are always armies of gullible people anxious to lap it up. There is a web site, the Rapture Index, that rates world events in reference to the end of days. You can find it yourself, but if you are curious, today's rating is 164, which in their terms, means "fasten your seatbelt". I watch this kind of thinking, and shake my head.

It is a lot easier to think "I am one of the elected few" and that I won't have to deal with hard problems because I'm going to be taken away, and those "left behind" can just suffer. Or that it will be over with quickly, whatever the disaster is to be, whether it is California falling into the sea in one massive earthquake (and NBC, you didn't help things at all with that execrable movie "10 1/2"), or massive asteroid impacts that destroy all life on the planet (unless Bruce Willis can blow up an atomic bomb "exactly 100 meters" down or something like that). Unfortunately a recent climate change movie (Day After Tomorrow) had to take a granule of truth and speed it up by a factor of thousands so they could destroy New York in a massive immediate ice age (although I liked the irony in the movie of having millions of Americans trying to get into Mexico).

The sad truth is that there are really big problems we face as a species, and they are not getting the attention they must have. The problems are interrelated: the end of the oil economy, climate change, soil erosion and drought, rising sea level. The people who have the real power in the world are invested in the status quo, and in most cases have little or no understanding of the science involved in the dire predictions for the next few decades. In fact, they can see no farther than the next election, so they are invested in making sure we don't think about these things. Nobody wants to elect a "downer" politician who calls for national sacrifice. Just ask Jimmy Carter, who made one of the finest speeches on what was needed to face the energy future in 1977, and who was repudiated at the polls in 1979. The men who beat him set us back decades in energy independence. We ended up fighting a war over oil in 1990-91, and oil factored in the war we are mired in now. And we import more than ever. And the seas rise, the droughts intensify, and we choose to worry more about Michael Jackson, and toilet flushing internet cats. Because our problems are hard.

And we have the embarrassment of having a sitting U.S. senator, James Inhofe, who has in all likelihood never sat through a science course in his life, heading to the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December to tell several thousand climatologists that they are all wrong about climate change. Scientific debate is critically important; putting ideological values above science is appalling.

And so I begin Earth Science Week with a certain feeling of despair. But it is only temporary. What can a few thousand teachers and educators do in the face of intractable and difficult problems? We can do a lot, actually. Education is a powerful weapon! Education drove the movement that resulted in the National Park System. Education drove the environmental movement in the 1970's that cleaned our air and water. Education resulted in the effort to reduce freon in the atmosphere. Education is making Californians safer in the face of future large earthquakes. So go for it! With all the knowledge you can share. We need it.

And if I am wrong, and the world ends in 2012, wherever we end up, I invite you to say "I told you so".

Prius and Honda, Ichthyosaurs and Dolphins, and Mary Anning

What do the Toyota and Honda gas-electric hybrids have to do with Ichthyosaurs and Dolphins? Devilstower offers up a nice discussion of convergent evolution this week over at DailyKos. The post explores why Australia has an ecosystem of marsupials who bear a striking resemblance to placental animals in other places, why bats and pterosaurs are so similar, and why sharks, dolphins and Jurassic sea-going reptiles called ichthyosaurs look like closely related animals when they are not. It also provides a decent explanation about why Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace both hit upon the idea of natural selection as a driving force behind evolution, and how the idea was facilitated by an early 1800's fossil collecter named Mary Anning. It's worth checking out! The ichthyosaur display in the picture is at the London Natural History Museum. It was an impressive wall of fossils, of which this is only a small part.

It's Earth Science week, by the way! What will you be doing this week to promote an understanding of climate change?

No Child Left Inside: Earth Science Week!

I want to encourage all of you to make the outdoors accessible to a child this year, in honor of Earth Science Week, October 12-18 (official site here)! What a great theme! It is true in my neck of the woods, and probably most other places that field trips for elementary school kids are becoming rarer and rarer as budgets tighten. We are spending more and more time teaching our children how to take a d*mned multiple-choice test in math and English, while forgetting that most real learning takes place in the sciences and arts. I guess we are trying to produce a bunch of factory automatons who will punch buttons well, and will never complain, never wish to travel, and never appreciate the wonderful world that lies beyond the edge of their city or town.

I see it already in my college classes: students who, in our case, live just a two hour drive from Yosemite National Park, but have never once been there. Many of the students in our area used to pay a visit to a local cavern (Moaning Caverns) in the 5th grade or so, but lately I am finding that fewer than ever have done so. I get blank looks when I mention it. It's a terrible loss, and a lost opportunity.

Those of us in the teaching community need to do what we can. If they can't take the child outside, we can bring the outdoors a little closer to them. Make yourself available to visit elementary classrooms; brings some rocks (especially volcanic ones), and bring some fossils (they go nuts over dinosaurs but are impressed by the smallest shells). Bring a projector and some digital images; they will follow with rapt attention your description of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, dinosaur digs, literally anything you want to talk about. They are hungry to hear from someone who has been out there doing these exciting things.

Kids today have a lot of distractions, in busy family lives, soccer practice, television, cell phones, the internet, and it can be hard to break through. But you can, believe me! In some parts of Utah, there are places where Cretaceous oyster fossils so common they are dug up and used for roadbeds. Take those same nearly useless shells, and give one to each kid in a classroom, and you will make an impression that will be remembered for years. Let a kid touch a real dinosaur bone, and they will not forget it.

You may never know what effect you have had, but sometimes you get a surprise.

About fifteen years ago, a parent brought her child on a field trip with me. I thought little of it at the time, but that young lady is finishing a master's degree in volcanology in Idaho these days. I didn't remember that she was on that trip so long ago, but she dropped off a picture of her as a ten-year-old standing next to a (much thinner) me that sits enshrined on my wall.

Take a chance. When there is an opportunity to do it, bring some kids on a field trip. Visit their classrooms, share some of your stories. It will have a huge effect.

The young lady in the bottom photo was finding out how stubborn an animal can be when protecting her young...the grouse actually stood down a line of vans in Grand Tetons, refusing to let us pass by, and not running away as we tried to shoo it off the road. Think she will ever forget the moment?