by John Dvorak
He was, as many people would say whether the encounter was brief or they’d known him for years, simply odd. A case in point was the impression he made on two strangers with whom he and Lillian shared a mule tour of the Grand Canyon. “At dinner we noticed what a peculiar person ‘Charles’ was,” wrote one of the mule riders. “He never looked at you when he spoke and just sat with a grin on his face that seemed to indicate he was in on some joke that you were not.” Later during the tour, the same writer speculated on what Richter might do for a living, suggesting facetiously “maybe he just caught butterflies,” then concluding that “he was too slow for that.” They never learned how brilliant he was!
Among his professional colleagues at the Seismological Laboratory, one, when he was first introduced to Richter, thought, “I had met a hobbit with bushy eyebrows.” Photographs spanning several decades do show that he had a lopsided, disheveled look about him, augmented by two tufts of hair that stood out from opposite sides of his head.
Another colleague, who worked closely with Richter for many years and who obviously chose his words carefully, said of the famous seismologist, “He could be charming or irascible; he could be outgoing or shy; he could be gentle and warm or abrupt and cold. And he was a man with a truly remarkable memory, but at the same time was renownedly absentminded.” He was also bumbling.
Once, during lunch, Richter tapped an egg against a counter, expecting to peel it. Instead, it broke and the contents ran down the table toward Richter’s boss, John Buwalda, the head of the geology department at the California Institute of Technology. Richter had thought he had brought a hard-boiled egg from home that morning.
At times, he exhibited a noticeable facial twitch and always worked with bird-like nervous energy. But he also showed tempers and tantrums. Bursts of rage could occur at any time, leaving those who witnessed such displays puzzled as to their cause. One person who knew him well wrote, “Many of us have fallen under his wrath at times.”
He was also a man of quick wit. To recall one such example, he was a guest on a radio talk show and the subject, as expected, was earthquakes. One female caller asked, with intense anticipation, “Oh, Dr. Richter, I’m so afraid of earthquakes. What should I do?” Richter replied, “Get the hell out of California!”
According to Richter, the original intention of the magnitude scale “was to take some of the nonsense” out of earthquake studies. In this regard, he realized his work was incomplete. To be meaningful, earthquake magnitude had to be related to a physical quantity, such as energy. In 1942, he and Beno Gutenberg proposed such a relationship, though they had no way to test it until the era of nuclear explosive testing.
The first nuclear test, which was known as “Trinity” and was exploded near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, sent out seismic waves that were recorded on most of the Wood-Anderson seismometers then installed in southern California.* Because the device—known as “the gadget”—was detonated in the air, there was no way to know how much of the energy of the nuclear blast had gone into producing seismic waves, so this first nuclear explosion could not provide a test of the Gutenberg-Richter energy-magnitude relationship. Likewise, the second controlled nuclear test, “Able,” conducted on Bikini Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, was also detonated in the air. The third test, “Baker,” also conducted on Bikini, was fired 90 feet underwater. Seismic waves from that explosion were recorded by instruments around the world—in California, the seismic waves were stronger from the Baker test than from Trinity—and gave Gutenberg and Richter their first chance to test their energy-magnitude relationship. It failed miserably.
The seismic waves arrived, as expected, about eleven minutes after the Baker test. From the maximum amplitude of the waves and knowing the distance between California and the test site—about 4,500 miles—Gutenberg and Richter estimated the strength of the Baker test to correspond to a magnitude-5.5 earthquake. According to their proposed magnitude-energy relationship, the amount of seismic energy released by the blast was equivalent to 250 kilotons of TNT. But the actual energy of the explosion—computed from the yield of the nuclear reactions—was much less, only 23 kilotons. That forced them to revise radically how they estimated seismic energy from earthquake magnitude. Another decade of work was required, using the seismic shaking of other nuclear explosions, before Gutenberg and Richter arrived at what is now regarded as an accurate way to convert magnitude to seismic energy.
As a rule of thumb, a one-kiloton explosion, whether by a nuclear device or by a conventional chemical bomb, equates to a magnitude-4.0 earthquake. Furthermore, an increase of one earthquake magnitude corresponds to a 32-fold increase in energy. That means that the largest nuclear device detonated by the United States—the Cannikin underground test on Amchitka Island, Alaska, in 1971, which had an energy yield of 5,000 kilotons—corresponded, in energy release, to a magnitude-7.1 earthquake. Not an inconsequential event, but 1,000 times smaller than the largest earthquake yet recorded, the Chilean earthquake of 1960.
And that shows how truly powerful the largest earthquakes are. As an example, the 2011 earthquake that originated near Mineral, Virginia, which damaged the top of the Washington Monument and caused buildings to sway in New York City and was probably felt by a third of the population in the United States, released about 500 kilotons of energy. The most costly earthquake to date in the United States, the 1994 Northridge earthquake in the San Fernando Valley, which caused $44 billion in damages, was 24 times more powerful than the 2011 Virginia earthquake. And the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was 64 times more powerful than the Northridge quake and 1,500 times the Virginia quake—numbers that should give people charged with responding to earthquake disasters pause that a truly colossal event such as a repeat of 1906 has not struck the contiguous United States in more than 100 years.
Throughout most of his life, earthquakes were at the core of Charles Richter’s existence. In a strange way, they also followed him after his death.
The first earthquake shaking he remembered occurred when he was ten and living in Los Angeles. His later work would show that it was a magnitude-6 event that occurred on May 15, 1910, along the Elsinore Fault southeast of Los Angeles. The last shaking he probably ever felt was during the early morning hours of August 4, 1985, also a magnitude-6 event, this one originating north of Los Angeles near Coalinga. He died seven weeks later on September 30 at the age of 85.
Between those two events, he felt scores of earthquakes, though most were slight shakings. But it was the Northridge earthquake on January 17, 1994, in San Fernando Valley northeast of Los Angeles that limits our ability to ever understand him.
His nephew Bruce Walport lived in Granada Hills near the earthquake’s center. He had inherited many of his uncle’s prized possessions, including rare books of science, art, and literature. Walport also had family home movies and diaries. He thought he was prepared for an earthquake, having stocked his house with emergency food and insured his house with an earthquake policy.
But minutes after the Northridge earthquake hit, fires broke out where gas mains had broken. One of the houses that burned was owned by Walport. So there is irony to the life of Charles Richter: The personal possessions of the world’s most famous seismologist—things that could have given insights into the man—were lost, years after his death, in the aftermath of an earthquake.
*This, of course, produced a new challenge: to isolate such delicate equipment from the normal small vibrations of everyday life, such as a person walking through a building or a vehicle passing nearby. So seismometers are now installed in concrete cellars or down boreholes. The first Wood-Anderson instrument was installed on a concrete floor in the basement of the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena. It was so sensitive that it recorded the rapid pulses of an earthquake that originated in Japan and that devastated Tokyo on September 1, 1923.
*Equipment designed to time the
Trinity test failed to operate correctly, so the exact detonation time—as now recorded by history—was deduced by Gutenberg and Richter from seismic records to be at 05:29:21 Mountain Standard Time on July 16, 1945, plus or minus two seconds.
Chapter 7
Of Petrol and Pinnacles
I got familiar with rocks, just like a rancher
gets familiar with his cattle.
—Thomas Dibblee, on mapping
the San Andreas Fault
Though it is hard to believe today, during the early history of the state of California, the abundance of oil was a nuisance. It fouled water supplies. Cattle roaming in pastures became mired in tarry pits. In some sections of a young Los Angeles, wagon drivers passing over dirt roads had to stop repeatedly to scrape away a black goo that stuck to the wheels, impeding their progress.
The first person who recorded a visit to California, Gaspar de Portolá, encountered the black goo. In July 1769, after feeling several seismic shakings, he was passing through what would later become known as the Wilshire district when he noticed several large pools of slowly bubbling black pitch. He wondered whether “this substance which flows melted from underneath the earth could occasion so many earthquakes.” Two hundred years later, geologists, after studying the situation carefully, would show that indeed there is such a connection, and a surprising one at that. Though long before that connection was made, Californians had changed their minds about the foul-smelling wheel-clinging oily tar that fouled water supplies, and they sought it out in earnest.
The first production of oil in California was in the northern part of the state in Humboldt County, where in 1865 a deep pit was dug at a settlement then known as New Jerusalem. Oozing from the pit was a dark gooey substance that the citizens started to send to San Francisco to cover roofs. To celebrate the discovery—and the economic gain it was expected to bring—the citizens of New Jerusalem rechristened their town Petrolia,* a name derived from “petroleum,” meaning “oil rock.” But the bonanza was short-lived—the oil extracted at Petrolia was heavy in tar and had little commercial value.
A commercially viable product was finally found decades later in downtown Los Angeles. In 1892, a stranded miner named Edward Doheny noticed, as many had already, that tar often clung to passing wagon wheels. He tracked it back to the source, a pit that today would be at the corner of Colton Street and Glendale Boulevard, about a half mile southwest of Dodger Stadium. He and a prospector friend, Charles Canfield, hurried to lease a nearby city lot and they started to dig. At 50 feet, they struck a pocket of gas and were almost asphyxiated. They hired an experienced driller who, at a depth of 600 feet, brought in a well of crude oil that was soon producing 50 barrels of liquid oil a day. It was a fast-flowing liquid crude—which meant it had almost no solid particles of tar in it and would burn easily—so they sold it as a cheap alternative fuel for kerosene lamps. They made a fortune.
Others followed suit. Within five years, nearly 3,000 oil wells had been drilled in and around Los Angeles. The first California oil companies were formed. So much crude oil was being produced that a few enterprising souls realized that a new and much bigger market than as a kerosene alternative was needed if they were going to continue to make money. One of those enterprising souls was Wallace Hardison, a founder of Union Oil.
In 1894, Hardison arranged with executives of Southern Pacific Railroad to view a demonstration of how much more efficient an oil-burning locomotive was than a coal-burning one. Hardison stacked up a line of railroad cars behind an oil-burning locomotive, then had the locomotive pull the cars up through steep Cajon Pass. The executives were impressed. Hardison then showed them the numbers: Oil was cheaper than coal. After that demonstration, the mania for California oil began, and technology dependent on oil was soon to follow.
By the early 20th century, automobiles had become popular—and there was a search for more oil fields. Additional ones were discovered south of Bakersfield and at Huntington Beach and Signal Hill. By 1925, California was producing almost a quarter of the world’s oil—and the production soon outstripped demand. Oil executives decided to fix prices, but before they could act, in 1929 the nation’s economy collapsed. The demand for oil fell dramatically.
The Second World War and the postwar economic boom fueled a new mania for California oil, but by then all of the obvious places to drill—oil seepages, tar pits, natural gas leaks—had been explored. So a new strategy was adopted.
In the 1920s, if a college-educated geologist showed up at an oil site he was apt to be sprayed intentionally with oily mud by workers and referred to contemptuously as a “mudsmeller.” But that was to change. By the 1940s, college men were welcome in the oil fields because they brought a new way to find oil: They would use the principles of geology to decide where the black gold might still be hidden.
But where should they look? If one examines a map of the major oil fields of California up to the 1930s, one notices that the most productive fields occur in one of three large regions: They lie west and south of Los Angeles and in nearby Ventura County, in the Coast Ranges around and north of Santa Barbara, or in the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley south of Bakersfield. At the center of these regions is a vast area where no one had yet found oil—and experienced oilmen could tell you why: It was cut through by the San Andreas Fault. The fault, so it was argued, had mangled and squeezed and disturbed the rocks so that oil could not accumulate in reservoirs.
But a few upstart college-trained geologists thought otherwise. One of them was a shy, lanky, often clumsy individual who for many years could be seen walking alone across the California landscape.
Thomas Wilson Dibblee Jr. was the quintessential Californian. His mother, Anita Orena, was a great-granddaughter of Captain José Antonio De la Guerra y Noriega, who in the early 1800s was appointed by the Mexican government to be the commandante of the Presidio at Santa Barbara. Dibblee’s father traced his family’s New World ancestry to Ebenezer Dibblee, an Englishman who immigrated to Massachusetts in 1635 and whose descendants continued west and arrived in California with other gold seekers in 1859.
Young Thomas Dibblee spent his childhood on a 20,000-acre ranch, Rancho San Julian, part of an original Mexican land grant located northwest of Santa Barbara at the foot of the Santa Ynez Mountains. At age 18, during his final year of high school, he was sent by his father out across the ranch with a consulting geologist—who, as chance would have it, had been educated by Lawson at Berkeley—to assess the potential for oil. No oil was found, but from the experience Dibblee began a lifelong interest in fossil collecting and gained an immediate appreciation for what could be learned by seeing how rocks are situated and how they are layered.
In 1936, Dibblee graduated from Stanford University—taught, in part, by Bailey Willis—with a doctoral degree in geology and paleontology. He worked for a short time for the state of California inventorying mercury deposits but, bored with a desk job, soon found work preparing geologic maps that could be used to search for oil.
The company that hired him was the Richfield Oil Company of California. Formed in 1905, during its first three decades of existence Richfield went through several bankruptcies and court-ordered reorganizations and mergers with other failed oil companies. In the 1940s, it was still struggling to find a major oil reservoir—most of the reservoirs then in production in California were under the control of a few big oil companies such as Standard Oil or Union—and the executives of Richfield decided they would find one by searching for it in a radically different way. First, the Richfield executives hired a cadre of recent college graduates such as Dibblee. Then they ordered the graduates to look for oil where no one had yet found it—in the vast region centered among the major known fields and cut through by the San Andreas Fault.
In this region of the Coast Ranges—the mass of mountains that parallel the coast of southern Oregon and northern California as far south as Santa Barbara—are a numb
er of elongated basins that seem ripe for oil prospecting. Each basin had been explored by the big oil companies and several exploratory wells had been drilled, but no one had ever been able to find an oil reservoir and establish a producing well. That fact led many to believe that, somehow, the San Andreas Fault had prevented the accumulation of oil. Nevertheless, with few other alternatives, executives of the Richfield Oil Company directed its college-trained men to search in this region. And so Thomas Dibblee went out to see what he could find.
His method of doing fieldwork still makes other geologists cringe. On a typical day, Dibblee slept until midmorning. Once awake, he would walk around for hours and return to camp and, after a quick meal of hard biscuits and coffee, he would sleep again. A day’s main work would begin in the midafternoon, when he would start a long walk. And Thomas Dibblee was a prodigious walker, typically covering 10 miles or more a day. Instead of a backpack, he carried a paper shopping bag, which was not replaced until after he married and his wife sewed a cloth one for him. Inside the bag were the essentials for his work: maps, pencils, a compass, rain gear, a water bottle, and a large box of raisins to support himself on his treks. Instead of wool socks and heavy boots, which most geologists consider indispensable in their work, Dibblee favored thin socks and worn-out sneakers so that he could move quickly and cover as much ground as possible.
He seldom took rock samples, which is another thing that infuriates geologists who try to follow his work today. Those few who ever accompanied him in the field and could keep up with his pace cannot remember ever seeing him chip away at a rocky outcrop to see what a newly exposed surface might look like. And he seldom wrote in a notebook, which many colleagues considered a sin. And he never stood still. He walked and walked, constantly drawing on his map while still moving forward, tracing out, as thin penciled lines barely visible on his map to anyone except himself, the geology that he was walking past. In fact, he covered so much ground and drew maps in such detail that it is said if you drive any road that connects San Francisco and Los Angeles and look at any distant outcrop of rocks, even those on steep peaks, it is almost certain that Thomas Dibblee once stood there.