by John Dvorak
Oil production in California peaked in the mid-1970s, though today California imports two-thirds of its petroleum needs. Since the 1970s, the volume of proven oil reserves in California has dropped significantly, so that today it is less than half what it was 30 years ago.
In that regard, it should be pointed out that only a small amount of the organics in the Monterey Formation were converted into oil; the vast majority still exist as waxy kerogen. But kerogen cannot be pumped out of the ground; however, it can be extracted by a process known as fracking that requires the hydraulic fracturing of rock by pressurized liquid—an action that might induce earthquake activity—followed by the injection of chemicals to dissolve the kerogen and cause it to separate from the rock, putting it into a liquid form that could be pumped to the surface.
Where and whether or not this should be done—and what would be the economic advantages and the environmental consequences—are being hotly debated.
But this much is known: The vast reserve of oil shale that exists beneath California and the development—and continued evolution—of the San Andreas Fault will continue to have complicated effects on the region.
*Because of their scenic qualities, Lake Moraine and Mount Tuzo were depicted, for many years, on the reverse side of the Canadian $20 bill.
*An international scientific project that actually lasted 18 months, from July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958, and that involved scientists from 67 countries who coordinated their research to understand the atmosphere, the oceans, and the solid earth. The first two artificial satellites were launched under this project, Sputnik by the Soviet Union and Explorer I by the United States.
Chapter 9
To Quake or Not to Quake
Reporter: Did anyone predict last night’s earthquake?
Richter: Not yet.
An attempt to use science to predict earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault began after an earthquake shook Alaska.
It was Good Friday, March 27, 1964, and at 5:36 P.M. an earthquake of magnitude 9.2—the second largest ever recorded by instruments anywhere in the world*—struck southern Alaska. The rupture began under Prince William Sound and, calculations would later show, ran west for 500 miles as far as Kodiak Island. Shaking was felt over millions of square miles. In Seattle, almost 2,000 miles to the southeast, patrons sitting inside the restaurant atop the city’s iconic Space Needle would later tell others that the slender tower had swayed “as in a high wind.”
In Anchorage, 80 miles from the earthquake’s origin, several major buildings, including the control tower at Anchorage International Airport, collapsed. The outer walls of the new JCPenney store fell out into the streets. In the fashionable Turnagain neighborhood, a massive landslide sent 75 houses into a nearby bay. That area has since been turned into a park—Earthquake Park. The shaking and collapse of buildings caused more than 100 fatalities in Alaska. More people were to succumb—and more damage was produced—as massive ocean waves, created by the severe shaking, swept across the Pacific Ocean.
The coastal community hardest hit was Crescent City, California. Here the local fishing fleet was swamped. Hundreds of downtown buildings were razed and more than a dozen people drowned. The level of destruction in Alaska and at Crescent City was a shock. But the question that played in the minds of seismologists in the United States immediately after the Alaska earthquake was this: What if the earthquake had happened in California?
A week later, on April 2, 1964, Frank Press, director of the Seismological Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, contacted Donald Hornig, President Lyndon Johnson’s chief science advisor, and suggested that a meeting be convened immediately of prominent seismologists and government officials “to discuss the problem of earthquake prediction.” At the meeting, Press formed a committee to devise a prediction program based on making precise measurements that might reveal some premonitory sign—a slight warping of the Earth’s surface, increased seismic activity, changes in local magnetic or gravity fields—that could warn scientists before the next major California earthquake occurred. The price of the research, Press estimated, was a staggering $137 million. He presented the program to Hornig, who promptly turned it down, citing the low annual death rate from earthquakes in the United States, which had averaged about ten deaths per year since 1906.
Undeterred, Press kept a discussion about the scientific prediction of earthquakes alive, reminding colleagues that they had a moral duty to protect society from the ravages of natural disasters. He also urged them to make earthquake prediction a legitimate scientific study and to take it away from “the purview of astrologers, misguided amateurs, publicity seekers, and religious sects with doomsday philosophies.”
Ellen White, a founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, is credited by some as giving the first accurate prediction of an earthquake along the San Andreas Fault, though she always denied she ever made such a prediction.
She was in southern California in Loma Linda on April 16, 1906, when, as she described it, “There passed before me a most wonderful representation. During a vision of night, I stood on an eminence, from which I could see houses shaken like a reed in the wind. Buildings, great and small, were falling to the ground. Pleasure resorts, theaters, hotels, and the homes of the wealthy were shaking and shattered.” Two days later, as she was on her way to a church in Los Angeles, she heard newsboys shouting: “San Francisco destroyed by an earthquake.”
White had many visions throughout her adult life. The first came in 1844 at age 17 when she reported seeing a line of people making a weary and dangerous climb to Heaven, some falling “off the path into the dark and wicked world below.” She also said she often saw angels. As to her 1906 vision, the day after the earthquake she told friends that more earthquakes would come and floods would follow, and that these were warnings from God that we should “not establish ourselves in the wicked cities,” of which she regarded San Francisco as one.
During the next several decades, predictions of California earthquakes kept coming from other sources. In 1965, the civil defense director of Santa Barbara County actually took action after he learned that noted psychic Jeane Dixon had predicted “some tremors in July.” Dixon had achieved national fame for a prediction she made in 1959 that the next person elected president would be assassinated. She later modified that prediction to say that the assassination would occur during a second term and that Richard Nixon would be the next president.
The civil defense director, Elvin Morgan, told reporters he did not want to take any chances: “If I didn’t alert the people and it did happen, I would look silly.” He ordered equipment removed from fire stations in case the buildings collapsed, and had police and lifeguards put on alert. Charles Richter, in Pasadena, sent letters condemning the action, saying the director had responded to “the vaporings of a crackpot.” Richter also pointed out that, because of the recent earthquake in Alaska, the number of “spurious earthquake predictions” had increased. Just in the first six months of 1965, “cranks” had predicted great earthquakes for California on January 17, February 4, March 17, April 1, April 16, and all of the month of May. But, as he pointed out, so far it had been a normal year, and none of those predictions had come true.
But that was not about to discourage others, who made more predictions. By the late 1960s, the rudiments of plate tectonics and the idea that the San Andreas Fault was a major fracture running through most of California had entered the public consciousness, morphing into the idea that sooner or later the entire state would fall into the ocean. In fact, in the spring of 1969, a Calypso-style song was frequently heard on local radio stations that asked: “Where can we go, when there’s no San Francisco? Guess we better get ready to tie up the boat in Idaho.” It was also in the spring of 1969 that a prediction by San Francisco housewife and clairvoyant Elizabeth Steen made headlines.
Steen said she had passed her
hands over a map of the United States. When her hands hovered over California, they shook uncontrollably. That caused her to leave San Francisco immediately with her husband and two children. They fled to Spokane, Washington, because when her hands had hovered over that city on the map, she “got good vibrations.”
Steen’s prediction prompted a steady stream of newspaper editorials and was the subject of several television documentaries, of which one emphasized that local psychics had labeled 1969 as a “doom year.” Steen herself never lived to see whether her prediction came true. Before leaving San Francisco, she announced the seismic catastrophe would be in April 1969, but she died in a Spokane hospital of a blood disease on March 28 of the same year.
Years earlier, Reuben Greenspan had been described as an “earthquake prophet,” a title given to him in 1935 by a New York Times editor. On July 9 of that year, the editor had received a letter from Greenspan stating that because the moon and Jupiter were nearly aligned in the sky, a major earthquake would occur during the next week “somewhere northeast of Australia.” On July 11, an earthquake did strike in Shizuoka Prefecture, 150 miles south of Tokyo, killing nine people and injuring about one hundred. It was from that “prediction” that his fame endured.
Over the years, Greenspan, who insisted that his predictions were based on tidal calculations from solar, lunar, and planetary positions and not on prophecies, issued a series of dire warnings. Successive ones became more and more specific. And almost all foresaw the demise of San Francisco. For June 10, 1951, he predicted that an earthquake worse than the 1906 disaster would hit at 9:30 A.M. Nothing happened. His most famous prediction was his last one. In December 1972 he announced that an earthquake would strike San Francisco on January 4, 1973, at 9:20 A.M. Mayor Joseph Alioto invited Greenspan to join him for tea in the mayor’s office at the prescribed time. Greenspan declined. With a week to go, the earthquake prophet recanted his prediction, saying his calculations had been wrong. He told newspaper reporters that he was leaving California and moving to Death Valley, where he would write poetry and, since the prediction of earthquakes had been solved, he would start work on the more challenging problem of the desalination of seawater.
Others continued to provide earthquake predictions. It was—and continues to be—an endeavor that many people feel qualified to do. The major requirement seems to be nothing more than a means to disseminate the message. A case in point is British science writer John Gribbin and the publication of his book The Jupiter Effect.
In 1974, Gribbin and co-author Stephen Plagemann argued that an “unusual” alignment of the planets in 1982 “might well trigger a California earthquake far worse than the San Francisco catastrophe of 1906.” The “alignment” consisted of all nine planets, including tiny and distant Pluto, being on the same side of the sun within an arc about 90 degrees wide. Because Pluto is the slowest-moving of the nine planets, its position is the most crucial to establishing the alignment, which happens about every 180 years—which means the “alignment” is not really unusual, either astronomically or geologically. Furthermore, Gribbin and Plagemann’s Jupiter effect—named because Jupiter is the most massive planet—does not explain why there was no planetary alignment during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake or during the much larger earthquakes in Chile in 1960 or Alaska in 1964 and why there isn’t a worldwide increase of seismic activity every 180 years.
In 1982 Gribbin and Plagemann published a second book, The Jupiter Effect Reconsidered, in which they suggested that the effect had actually taken place in 1980 and had triggered the eruption of Mount St. Helens. In 1999, Gribbin admitted their argument was flawed and said, “I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.” But even today some earthquake predictors continue to use planetary positions, despite the very meager gravitational forces produced that are not even enough to affect the tides.
An ever-popular belief is that animals can somehow sense impending earthquakes—and there is a wealth of anecdotal claims to support it, but no scientific evidence. Literally hundreds of species, from aardvarks to ants, have been studied. In one of the more extensive, funded for four years by the United States government, hundreds of volunteers who watched pets, farm animals, and zoo animals in California were given access to a dedicated telephone line and asked to call whenever they saw unusual behavior. Almost all of the reports filed—and there are tens of thousands—were called in after a felt earthquake.
One of the most persistent claims of unusual animal behavior before earthquakes has been made by James Berkland, who has tabulated the number of notices in newspapers of lost or runaway pets. His reasoning was that if dogs and cats sensed premonitory changes, those changes might make them feel unsettled and cause them to leave home. A statistical study done, independent of Berkland, of ads of missing pets in the same newspapers, which included reports of the occurrence of a magnitude-6.2 earthquake south of San Francisco, concluded there was no such correlation.
But claims that psychic energy, planetary positions, or odd animal behavior can be used to predict earthquakes persist. And, as already noted, Frank Press acknowledged this 50 years ago when he urged a serious commitment by scientists to earthquake prediction. He followed up by saying that “the forecasting of catastrophe is an ancient and respected occupation,” but that it was now time for society to “part company with soothsaying and astrology” and to begin a program with “a scientifically rigorous pursuit.”
Press was the son of immigrants who came from Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. His parents left by traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to the Pacific in 1916, keeping ahead of the growing turmoil as revolution swept through Russia. Somehow, they made it to China and from there to the United States, where they settled in an enclave of other recently arrived Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York.
They found rooms in a tenement, where in 1924 their third and last child, Frank, was born. He attended public schools, which he always regarded as excellent, but where there was a problem. The smart kids were assigned to the front rows, and at first Frank was always in the back because he was unable to follow lessons. But that changed after his mother had saved enough money and bought him a pair of eyeglasses. “I couldn’t see the blackboard,” he would say years later. “Everything was just a big blur all the way through the first six grades, but I thought that was just the way things were.” From then on, he sat in the front row—and would always be at the top of his class the whole way through.
He attended Columbia University in the 1940s, following an interest in physics and mathematics, but his attention started to shift when, while taking a geology class, he went on several short field trips to see a schist and a gneiss in Manhattan and a diabase in the Palisades.* For an advanced degree, he worked on some of the early oceanographic data being collected that would lead others to the idea of plate tectonics. For himself, he was one of the chief designers of a new type of seismometer that could record distant earthquakes. In 1957, because of his new type of seismometer, he was appointed director of the Seismological Laboratory in Pasadena; then eight years later, because of his managerial skills, he was appointed head of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. Press was a rising star—and he would rise much higher.
During his career, he worked on a wide range of problems in seismology, both practical and theoretical. He was involved in determining how to verify that the Soviet Union was conforming to the conditions of the Test Ban Treaty signed in 1963 to limit the testing of nuclear weapons. He was among the first to study and explain how the Earth “rang like a bell” when a sufficiently large earthquake—like the 1960 Chile earthquake or the 1964 Alaska earthquake—caused the entire planet to vibrate. But the idea of earthquake prediction held a special fascination, one that was not deterred by the inability to get a national program of seismic research started after the great seismic catastrophe happened in Alaska in 1964. I
t was a matter of waiting for the right opportunity. And the next opportunity came early on the morning of February 9, 1971.
It is known as the earthquake that woke Los Angeles—both literally and figuratively. At 55 seconds before 6 A.M., the ground began to vibrate. The strong shaking lasted 12 seconds. Then at 6:01 A.M., there was a second shock, smaller than the first; then minutes later four more shocks so close together that they felt like one long earthquake. In all, the series lasted 5 minutes and 11 seconds. In that time, the ground surface ruptured and two major hospitals suffered extensive damage in the Sylmar District of the San Fernando Valley in California.
Some of the surface rupture can still be seen today, though it has been smoothed over by bulldozing, and the mile-long scarp that was formed is often difficult to find, now covered by houses or small commercial buildings. The best place to see it is on Glenoaks Avenue south of Hubbard Street. Here the drive-through lane of a fast-food restaurant runs right along the base of a three-foot-high step dividing the restaurant from its parking lot. That step is where the ground ruptured and rose in 1971.
Of immediate concern after the earthquake were the two hospitals. Forty-nine people died during the collapse of the Veterans Administration Hospital, built in 1925 and not designed to withstand earthquakes. The Olive View Medical Center, which was designed to withstand earthquake shaking, had opened a month earlier. Fortunately, it was unoccupied when the four wings of the five-story structure pulled away from the central structure and three stair towers toppled.