. . EARTHQUAKES IN HUMAN HISTORY By Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders (Princeton University Press, 267 pages, $30)
Review By Russell Seitz
Rare is the disaster that transcends cliché. This is one?Sunday?s death toll rivals Hiroshima?s. Whether it was the Wrath of Nature or of God, there was plenty of it to go around. The devastation is total and indiscriminate.
The earthquake savaged the Islamic insurgents of Indonesia?s Aceh province, the Tamil Tiger terrorists of eastern Sri Lanka and an Andaman Sea pygmy tribe unheard of since its debut in an 1890 Sherlock Holmes story. The Nias Islanders of Sumatra?smack atop the earthquake?s epicenter?saw their Stonehenge-size megaliths bowled over like ninepins. As the Indian Ocean undulated, the Maldives, an archipelago low enough to trip over, went under and came up again before Greenpeace could blame global warming. The waves whirled trident-wielding Hindu mystics off the beaches of Madras and into Poseidon?s realm. They swept away the fleshpots of Phuket, Thailand, together with mosques and the odd teak-framed synagogue or Anglican chapter house, not to mention Buddhist nunneries and the beach huts of body-pierced surfers from the Straits of Malacca to Zanzibar.
But geologically, Dec. 26 was just another conniption of the Earth?s great plates, as the mantle?s slow turnover forces rocks down deep enough to pressure-cook jade in Burma?s basement, implode basalt and graphite into garnets and diamonds under India, and extrude granite peaks like toothpaste from the landscape of Borneo.
It all happens no faster than your fingernails grow?millimeters a month. Four thousand fathoms beneath the whale-sharks that bask in the Andaman Sea, India?s tectonic plate is shoved into the Sunda Trench and under the Pacific Rim like a wad of junk mail threatening to lift a door off its hinges. An airport paperback?s worth is wedged into the crack each year, and this Christmas the 100-foot accumulation of the centuries finally split the devil?s own doorsill. In an explosive 200-megaton jolt, the seabed snapped upward several meters along a ?thrust front? more than 1,000 kilometers long. Gigantic as this impulse was?the Earth?s axis shifted an inch , 100 times more energy went into forcing the plate under.
Even before the waves arrived, some noticed GPS readings twitching in unison aboard Indonesia?s coastwise fleet. It suddenly seemed anchored to a stirring turtle?s back, and bad things began to happen. They have before, certainly, and will yet again. Heaven help relief workers if aftershocks from Sunday?s quake launch further tsunamis in the months to come.
Such are the sobering lessons of ?Earthquakes in Human History,? a splendid geographical and cultural survey of how, over the centuries, the unquiet Earth has altered our sense of nature and ourselves. The authors, the geologist Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and the science writer Donald Theodore Sanders, properly make much of the events most famously prefiguring Sunday?s? like those of All Souls Day 1755, when Iberian cathedral towers crashed down on crowds at prayer and thousands perished in the Great Lisbon Earthquake.
That cataclysm?s historical aftershocks outstripped its human toll. The Marques de Pombal rose to an unenlightened dictatorship, and the Jesuits fall from power in Portugal reverberated from Paris to Paraguay. The Wrath of God in Lisbon gave impetus to the Methodist Awakening in Britain, steeled Puritan New England in its independence, ignited the Masonic zeal of Mozart?s ?Magic Flute? and set Voltaire?s agnostic quill aquiver like an indignant seismograph needle. Was this the best of all possible worlds?
Had it ever been? Jerusalem?s walls, like Jericho?s, have come a-tumbling down some 40 times in the past three millennia?Herod did well to use 600 ton blocks in the Temple Mount?s present foundations. A quake antedating Exodus may have trashed and burned Sodom and Gomorrah. The fifth century B.C. saw Sparta?s capital shattered and a tsunami doing what the Persian Wars could not?sending the remainder of the Spartan navy to the bottom of the Gulf of Corinth. Both catastrophes gave the fledgling democracy of Athens some much-needed breathing space.
The Crusaders arrived just in time to see the Lighthouse of Alexandria succumb to a jolt by the Dead Sea rift, a badly designed tectonic zipper that renders the Middle East as seismically unstable as its politics. In 1382, Oxford theologian John Wycliffe?s heresy hearing was interrupted by a temblor that toppled the tower of Canterbury Cathedral. Had the Spanish Armada jumped the gun by eight years, it might have joined dozens of vessels sunk by the Dover Channel tsunami of 1580. In short, Lisbon was but one episode in an epidemic of Old World cataclysms.
Seismic jitters extend all the way across the Mediterranean. One day all of Gaul may indeed be divided into three parts, as Africa?s rotation bonks Corsica into the Cote d?Azur, avenging Napoleon and Hannibal alike.
The Earth is not alone in showing signs of seismic wear-and-tear. Jupiter?s moon Io may look like an illustration from ?Le Petit Prince,? but its wheezing sulfur volcanoes testify to honest-to-gosh tidal waves induced by the crushing gravity of the nearby giant planet. Earthly earthquakes, by contrast, have almost nothing to do with our moon?s motion. They are driven instead by the motion of the mantle, a deep-seated dynamo that, by providing a magnetic field, also wards off the ravening gale of the solar wind. Mars seismic peace and quiet has cost it most of its atmosphere leaving the Red Planet encrusted in green vitriol and Epsom salts. It could use a tsunami.
Life on a geologically active planet is thus a trade-off between one evolutionary challenge and another. Ours may not seem the best of all possible worlds to an insurance agent?or a pacifist?but it has its moments. The existential terror of coexisting with suicide bombers and office-building kamikazes cannot erase all memory of the exhilarating day in 1989 when the Cold War ended, leaving in its wake the last thing the peace movement predicted: large numbers of survivors. The same may be true of even the most catastrophic environmental hazards.
When this quake?s mourning has passed, like San Francisco?s (1906) or Tokyo?s (1923) before it, parents around the Pacific Rim will begin reciting to their children a new Christmas story. Far from Panglossian, it will tell of a disaster of literally biblical proportions that brought to its survivors the improbable gift of hope. Practically everyone East of Suez has lost loved ones or friends, but in days to come it will dawn that for each victim tens of thousands yet live, awaiting the Big One with the rest of us.
But what to do while we?re waiting? The Christmas Quake registered 9.0 on the Richter scale. But Richter?s scale runs on to 10--30 times more energetic than last week?s and worse still in terms of risk to the third of humanity dwelling within sight of the sea. Grouchy Poseidon has thus far overthrown or obliterated six out of seven classical Wonders of the World.
Billions of dollars are spent annually on understanding aspects of climate change too ephemeral to elicit consensus, but intellectual tools already exist, to calculate the concrete threats posed by continents in collision. Yet for sheer lack of funding, seismologists have scarcely begun the task. Unless we enable them to understand the Sunda trench better than submariners, and set our navy on guard against nature?s terrors as well as mans, it will remain akin to blasphemy to dismiss seismic disasters as acts of God.
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