18 April 2006

Faults

It is a round hundred years this morning since the earth moved under San Francisco. The quake lasted for a minute or so, and the ground slipped along the fault line for about 25 feet, releasing the tension that tugged on the rock and soil.

The movement was fairly brief, and the adjustment was the geologic equivalent of adjusting ones underwear. It was the collapse of the buildings and the three days of fires that caused three thousand to die.

Pressure has been building since then on the fault, a foot-inch per year, ever since. The earth does not comport itself within the framework of our round symbolic numbers, or our small lifetimes. Generations of Italian have lived peacefully on the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius since the hot ash flew, even if they did not rebuild Pompeii, or even find Herculaneum for 1,500 years.

The people who are supposed to read the tea leaves on this sort of thing say that there is a 65% chance that the fault under Oakland will slip within the next quarter century. And as to the 800-mile long San Andreas, well, it is starting to quiver a lot like it did way back when.

There are a lot more people living on top of the fault than there were then, but there is no certainty that it will happen in precisely the same location, or in the same way. The past is a distant mirror. It is like the momentary blip of crude oil prices over $70 a barrel this morning. The particular date is not important. It is the trend that counts.

If I was tracking trends, I would note that the Administration has had no comment on the spike in the cost of oil. I don't know if it is the Iranian sabre-rattling that is making the markert juttery, or some slowly-building but inexorable pressure. I only noticed it at the pump over the weekend, but paid no particular mind. There were no troops present to ensure order was maintained, as there was, briefly, the last time gas cost this month. It is my habit of filling up as soon as the gauge gets down to the three-quarter mark that insulates me from the reality of what is happening.

It has always cost $20 bucks to fill up the tank. But that was when I was filling the whole thing .

If I was doing on of those heroic Washington commutes from the distant suburbs in order to live in something a little more extravagant than Big Pink, I might be take this more personally. The distance that the earth moved on the San Andreas was really only the equivalent of the space between my refrigerator and my front door.

It really isn't that far, and the earth doesn't move that often. That accounts for why people re-build over fault lines, or rec-onstruct cities that are twenty feet below sea level.

Nicholas Kristoff tried to get our attention this morning in the Times. It was a little over the top, but fun. He latched on to the theory of the Methane Burp, a process by which thousands of gigatons of congealed methane hydrates on the ocean floor are warmed to the thawing point and rapidly change state into gas.

Methane is twenty times more efficient than carbon dioxide as a green-house gas, and in short order the already beleaguered icecaps would disappear along with the lower twenty feet of New York City.

I know Mr. Kristoff was firing for effect, though he presented some geologic evidence to support the theory of massive and apparently spontaneous gas release. But it happened a long time ago and doesn't happen very often. I think he really was just trying, desperately, to get the Administration to take the energy crisis seriously.

There are affairs of the planet and geology, and there are the affairs of mankind. For the first time they appear to be intersecting. The Iranian Bomb, the cost of gas, and the rising of the seas are all interconnected. It is no one's fault, not individually, anyway. Still, we ought to have a public discussion as we pour dollars into the Iranian coffers in exhange for their oil. I think it is worth a public discussion. But that has not happened, except in a narrow context.

The most noteable example was the President's somewhat peevish interlude in the State of the Union Address. The camera angle was heroic enough, magnifying the man at the podium, and from that vantage it was possible to briefly see Saudi representative in the audience squirm in his chair and adjust his underwear.

I forwarded a copy of Kristoff's Op-Ed piece to the Corps of Engineers just in case, though. When they re-build the levees in New Orleans, they might want to plan to construct them 40-feet high, to match the new hundred-year flood plain. But there are resource considerations to be accommodated, and the hundred-year flood doesn't happen very often.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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