A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester

  *Like “The Seven Cities of Cibola,” “Quivira,” and “El Dorado,” the word “California” is fanciful, an invented name for an imagined utopia. The word was coined by a sixteenth-century writer named García Ordóñez de Montalvo, who wrote a short story about an island filled with gold and diamonds, populated by black Amazons who rode griffins and were ruled by a queen named Califia. From the first Spanish contact in 1542 until an expedition in 1701, the real California was thought to be an island, too. The first physical features to be given the name were a gulf (still so named, and into which the Colorado River would flow if it flowed into the sea at all) and a cape, both identified as such on a Spanish map of 1562.

  *And named: California has officially been the “Golden State” since 1968; gold has been the official state mineral since 1965, and “Eureka” the state motto since 1963. There was an attempt to make “In God We Trust” the motto, but that ploy went the same way as Coal Hill and slid into respectable oblivion.

  *Few are the world’s political frontiers that mark tectonic boundaries as well. Within America one might argue that where North Carolina marches with Tennessee is the demarcation line of an ancient orogeny, evidence of a period of mountain building and folding. But beyond America, it seems clear that only the well-guarded border between Nepal and Tibet happens also to mark the divide between two plates, the Indian and the Asian, each pushing firmly against the other, and forming the Himalayas as a result.

  *The beacon was erected in 1928 by Standard Oil, to help guide in eastbound planes coming from over the Pacific, and westbound planes arriving at the Bay from the difficult and stormy skies over the Sierras. Pilots from New York said they could see its beam while they were still in the relatively safe skies over Nevada, more than a hundred miles away. The invention of radar and radio bea-cons—and the fact that airliners flew at ever-greater altitudes—soon rendered the searchlight all but worthless, and the Diablo Beacon is these days lit only once a year, each December 7, as a memorial to the attack on Pearl Harbor. During the last days of 1941 it had become quite literally a beacon of safety for all those aircraft fleeing the Hawaiian bombardment, and a valedictory light for those others heading out to wage war.

  *Brewer climbed his mountain, twice. He left the records of his second ascent, in 1895, in a bottle on the summit—a bottle that was later found and taken to the small museum in the offices of the Sierra Club in San Francisco. But, irony of ironies, it was later destroyed in the fire that followed the earthquake in 1906.

  *It was named for Commodore Robert Stockton, who, in 1846, captured the Mexican military outpost of Los Angeles and four days later formally annexed the Mexican province of Alta California in the name of the United States. Stockton is, essentially, the founder of American California.

  *Representative James R. Mann had long entertained a particular dislike for the adulteration of coffee with, he wrote, “Scheele’s green, iron oxide, yellow ocher, chrome yellow, burnt umber, Venetian red, turmeric, Prussian blue and indigo … roasted peas, beans, wheat, rye, oats, chicory, brown bread, charcoal, red slate, bark and date stones.” The legislation that he sponsored, the Pure Food and Drug Act, passed into law on June 30, 1906.

  *Some geological reference works insist on calling this the North America Plate—one adjective followed by two nouns rather than the more customary two adjectives followed by one noun. Pedantic distinctions are as common in geology as they are in lexicography: I remain terminologically agnostic in this case, but will keep the usage “American.”

  *Latitude 70° N—the implication being that the ocean could have widened itself very much more, by several thousand miles, in the more southerly latitudes.

  *A full account of the expedition and its findings appears in chapter 3 of my Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883.

  *However pure and unmoved by commerce most igneous geologists may be, the growing familiarity of the Skaergaard and intrusions like it have not escaped the notice of those commercial companies that like to mine the planet for treasure. The chromium layers are just one of a number of metal-rich zones, and there is gold and platinum and palladium in showy abundance, seemingly there for the taking. One supposes that the Inuit Greenlanders may wish to preserve their corner of the world from plunder—but how long, with riches like these on hand, will they be able to hold out?

  *The Gonds are a southern Indian people known to the imperial British for their protruding navels and, in more recent times, for their remarkable mural paintings.

  *This is the current internationally accepted abbreviation for Million Years Before Present. The lowercase a is a creation of the Système International d’Unités, which sets down standards for all manner of measurements, including the meter, the kilogram, the second, the ampere, the candela, the Kelvin, and the mole. It is the accepted abbreviation for the Latin anno. It serves also as replacement, in the geological context, for another abbreviation, that of the archaic word “agone”: ago.

  *After John Flamsteed designated it as running through Greenwich, near London, in 1675 and then twenty-five countries formally adopted it, or another very close by, at a conference in Washington, D.C., in 1884.

  †Ur was named by a geophysicist at the University of North Carolina, John Rogers. His paper announcing the idea, and suggesting it take the name of the ancient capital of the Chaldees, appeared in the Journal of the Geological Society of India in 1993.

  *Whatever dignity might be conferred by naming a continent “Kenorland” is marginally lessened by knowing that Kenora itself is a somewhat less-than-stellar acronym. The word comes from the first two letters of each of the names of the neighboring settlements of Keewatin, Norman, and Rat Portage, the last so called because of the annual migration of muskrats along the local river.

  *My journey took me by way of Manhattan, Richmond, Fayetteville, and a small South Carolina town called Florence.

  *It is believed that the Wappingers Falls Earthquake, which occurred in a section of the Ramapo Fault already long overdue for a rupture, was in fact triggered by drilling from a nearby quarry.

  *Charleston’s earthquake was large compared to that at Bam in 2003, which had a magnitude of 6.6 but resulted in the deaths of more than 30,000 people; both of these events were modest when ranged against the Sumatran event of December 26, 2004, which had a magnitude of 9.0, killed about 275,000, and is one of the biggest quakes of all time.

  *Standard Oil, it is often said, did far more lasting damage in Charleston than any earthquake when, in the fifties, it demolished the magnificent mansion that had belonged to a grandee and architect named Gabriel Manigault, and built two gas stations on the property in its place.

  *The earth remains very unstable in these parts, whatever the reason. On my computer is a map, brought up-to-date every five minutes, that shows all the earthquakes that occur in the United States and its possessions, every hour of every day. On any given map—which preserves a week’s worth of recorded events—there may be as many as 550 separate items, each one a record of some seismic happening, so long as it is greater than 1.0 on the Richter scale. As it happens, at the very moment I was completing work on the 1886 Charleston Earthquake, a small red square appeared on the map, in southeastern South Carolina. I zoomed in and found that at 09:13:14 Universal Time on this particular summer’s day there had been a magnitude 3.0 event six miles below the earth’s surface, just outside the hamlet of Summerville—where it had all started a century and a quarter before.

  *In 1811 there was a large catalog of particularly ominous auguries, with which so many earthquakes seem to be invested. Presiding ominously over all was the Great Comet, discovered that spring by Honoré Flaugergues, seen in Europe by Herschel and Humboldt and then witnessed in South Africa—where there was also an earthquake. When it appeared in America, it spawned much wailing and lamentation. The Shawnee chief Tecumseh, feared as much as Geronimo was in the West, is said to have predicted a dread disaster. There had been floods on the Ohio and
Mississippi Rivers, hurricanes off Cape Hatteras, a hugely lethal theater fire in Virginia, plagues of pigeons and Carolina parakeets, and congregations of depressed-looking squirrels that drowned themselves in a number of Midwestern lakes. Such portents as these last—which also had hogs biting each other, outbreaks of strange fevers, lightning storms without thunder, strangely colored sunsets, “electrical columns” appearing in the sky, and wolves going sensationally mad—are doubtless the kind of post hoc ergo propter hoc observations that attend just about any great disaster.

  *A city with soul, it was remarked, but, since it is so close to the New Madrid seismic zone, a city with an Achilles’ heel as well.

  *Though not with France, which most townsfolk regard with contempt since learning of the Gallic disdain for the Iraq War. They serve only “freedom fries” at the general store, and the Fort Sill artillerymen approve.

  * To this day, many Americans like to remember that the purchase of Alaska was known as “Seward’s Folly.”

  †In 1846, just before the start of the Mexican War, a brief revolt—the Bear Flag Revolt—had broken out inside California against Mexican rule, with Yankee settlers boldly declaring California to be an independent republic. But then came the war, American troops seized the Alta California capital of Monterey, installed the first of seven military governors, and rendered the revolution essentially moot. But the battling independence of the revolt’s architects is revered, with their bear still the dominant image of California today, at the center of the state’s official flag.

  *In the interests of historical tidiness it is worth noting that the fifth treaty, the Gadsden Purchase of 1854, won yet more land, while ostensibly seeking to iron out some inconsistencies in the 1848 treaty. The American railway companies were essentially behind the scheme to extract further concessions from America’s then weak and cash-strapped neighbor, and eventually did win the handover of what is now the southern third of Arizona and a narrow strip of lower New Mexico. Whatever the merits and motives of the purchase, with Gadsden continental America was finally made whole.

  †This is no place to enter into the argument over whether Sir Francis Drake landed his privateer in a cove near San Francisco—a subject that has exhausted more acres of fine forestry than most episodes of maritime lore. A small industry—populated by acolytes and writers and conventioneers, and furnished with Drake-named societies, any number of two-lane highways, not a few navigational features, and a scattering of fan clubs—currently exists in California and neighbor states in support of the notion that he did so, in 1579. That he did not obviously lay formal Elizabethan claim to the newfound land allows fervid imaginations to run riot over the possibilities spawned by the simple thought: What if he had?

  *The Spanish residents of California to whom Dana was referring were actually known as Californios. They had unremittingly poor relations with their Mexican governors, whose rule was seen as capricious and irksome. Miniature rebellions erupted from time to time, which further sapped the locals’ energies.

  *The soldier-turned-trapper Benjamin Bonneville, who had crossed the mountains on his way to Oregon in 1833, had been born in France.

  *Nearby is the small town of Paradise, one of about twenty that have been so optimistically named across America. When I made an effort to visit them all during one summer in the eighties, I was dismayed to find each had been spoiled to some degree or other by tourism, greed, development, or a simple lack of care. Except, that is, for the tiny town of Paradise, Kansas, close to the geographical center of the United States, which is quite lovely still, and happens to be home to four families named Angel.

  *Marshall was not the first to find gold. Six years before, while taking a lunch break in a meadow some thirty-five miles north of what is now Los Angeles, a man named Francisco Lopez y Arballo found nineteen ounces of gold pellets sticking to the roots of the local onion plants. He and his colleagues collected them and sent them off to the Philadelphia Mint for assay: They were valued at more than $40,000. But, despite churchly fervor and pious incantations, no more gold was found—until six years later, 400 miles to the north.

  *Some delegates to California’s first constitutional convention, which met in September 1849 in the then capital of Monterey, wanted the state to extend itself across all of what is Nevada, and to incorporate much of Utah and Arizona, too—making it the biggest state in the Union, and too big, thought Washington, to control. The idea was rejected by the Monterey delegates themselves, avoiding what could have been an unpleasantly divisive argument with the national capital.

  *One scientist, named Rufus Porter, planned a steam-powered dirigible service that would speed prospectors west at 100 mph. He floated a company, but never an airship.

  *Alonzo Delano, the New York humorist who went out west and wrote some of the most acutely observed essays on the Forty-Niners, observed drily that anyone traveling overland to California positively deserved to find a fortune.

  *California, once established, had been admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as free state, meaning in essence that slavery was banned. The first civilian governor, a Tennessee Democrat named Peter Burnett, had resigned a year later because of “certain personal prejudices”—among which was his view that blacks should be barred from entering the state at all.

  *The first official state highway was the Lake Tahoe Wagon Road, taken under the wing of the newly created Bureau of Highways just before the turn of the century.

  *See the prologue, page 18.

  *Or nearly all: In the summer of 2004 a hitherto almost unknown site of an ancient American Indian civilization was unveiled in eastern Utah, with hints that there are more finds yet to come.

  †Amarillo, which has come to symbolize the edge of American settlement and the formal beginning of the West, sits almost precisely astride the 102° meridian.

  *By chance it happens that Yellowstone, and in particular the behavior of its famous geysers—Old Faithful being the best known—have been shown recently to enjoy a curiously unexpected connection with the earthquakes that occur along the edge of the North American Plate, miles away to the west. I will try to explain the connection and what is known about its causes in a later chapter; but for now this link serves to remind us that Ferdinand Hayden’s own connections to this story are rather more intimate than one might initially suppose.

  *He was also the subject of many laudatory (and usually pretty dreadful) poems, including one by an Australian fellow geologist declaring that Gilbert’s “many faults were mighty ones.”

  *The river has had three names: Río de Buena Guía (“River of Good Guidance”), Río del Tizón (“River of Half-burned Wood”), and finally Río Colorado (“Red-colored River”).

  *Inevitably, since geologists can be a fractious crowd, there are other contenders, each vocally supported. Their papers, all produced at around the same time—for it was around 1970 when plate tectonic realizations fully dawned in the American West—are noted in the bibliography.

  *The OED’s first citation is from 1426: “my best covered cup of silver and gilt … with one serpentyn in the bottom.” Serpentine, so important in the story of the state’s making, has now been formally adopted as the state rock of California.

  *One might almost say that the Penrose Conferences, which were established in 1969, and to which any geologist in the world can seek an invitation, came about specifically to discuss the new whole-earth geology that had been born at much the same time. The first conference held in Tucson a year before had more limited ambitions—it discussed copper—but what has come to be known as the Asilomar Penrose was designed as something else: a truly worldwide conference to support the fast-growing idea that geology had truly changed, and would never be the same again.

  *The mission’s builders created their church of out of adobe bricks, which are typically sun-dried mud mixed with straw. Damaged bricks examined after the quake were found to have ox blood, horse manure, and dead birds stirred into the mix
as well.

  *The way in which earthquakes are classified is more than a little complex: An explanation more properly belongs in the appendix.

  *The fault was first comprehensively delineated in the official Report of the California State Earthquake Commission, established to inquire into the 1906 events. Since the author of the report was a somewhat bumptious geologist named Andrew Lawson, a mischievous canard circulated suggesting that he named the fault after himself.

  *One of these is Isla Robinson Crusoe, since a local shipwrecking story is thought to have inspired Daniel Defoe.

  * To complicate matters still further the southern part of the Juan de Fuca Plate, at the point where it meets the Pacific and North American Plates, is called the Gorda Plate. Where it connects to the Juan de Fuca there is a spreading zone, making the geology of Northern California and southern Oregon—especially the mysterious and fascinating Klamath Mountains—weirdly complex.

  *A diagram of a typical seismographic record of a large earthquake annotated to show the subtle and not-so-subtle distinctions between the various waves used to chart the event’s distance, depth and magnitude, can be found in the appendix.

  *One other very Big Science experiment that once had geologists excited was the attempt to use a deep-sea research vessel to drill through the seabed to the so-called Mohorovicic discontinuity, the Moho, which marks the division between the earth’s crust and mantle. It proved costly and difficult, and was abandoned in 1966. The Japanese drilled close to the Nojima Fault on Awaji Island in 1995, but they stopped also, after less than half a mile down.

  *He also took a violin, on which he would play serenades to the coyotes.

  *It is in Palmdale that highly contorted strata resulting from the fault’s movement are displayed to advantage in one of the most famous and often photographed road cuttings in the world. They are on the east side of California Route 14, and, because there are three top-secret airbases also visible from the site, the local police take a rather dim view of photographers stopping there. An innocent geologist—especially a foreigner—can get into a good deal of trouble, and offering the excuse of merely trying to photograph the San Andreas Fault doesn’t cut much ice these days.