The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet

by Henry Fountain

  Plafker had been on many flights where the pilot had set his plane down in the middle of one of Alaska’s wide rivers, on a gravel bar. These bars often had logs or other debris on them, but the pilot would pick out a place that was clear enough for landing, and the plane usually had large low-pressure tundra tires that could handle rough terrain. Leaving, though, was another matter, because the plane required a longer run to take off. So after unloading, Plafker and the others would spread out over the bar and clear enough debris to make a runway that was long enough.

  Problem solving and improvisation sometimes led to misadventures. Plafker had been at a cabin near a lagoon along the coast once when a plane equipped with both skis and wheels came in to pick him up. The pilot thought he’d be able to land on a mudflat at the edge of the lagoon, but it was too small. So he came in on the water with his skis down, keeping his speed up enough so that he skimmed across the surface like a water skier until he reached the mudflat. It worked for the landing, but taking off was trickier, especially with a full load of people and supplies. The pilot had to reverse the process—begin the takeoff on wheels on the mudflat and then, when he reached the water, jack the skis into position at just the right moment, hoping that he had enough speed to stay afloat and eventually take off. It didn’t work the first time—the plane didn’t sink, but got awfully wet before they were able to drag it back to shore—and they had to remove equipment to lighten the load until the technique worked. Plafker found that in situations like these the tension level would increase with each failed takeoff.

  Most flights were far less stressful. The pilot would land the plane, the geologists would unload their equipment and supplies, arrangements would be made to be picked up at the same spot in a week or so and the pilot would take off for Cordova, or wherever he was based. But the plane’s departure was often the moment during the whole adventure when Plafker felt the greatest unease. That pilot, he would realize, was the only person in the world who knew exactly where they were. If he crashed before he got back home, that knowledge died with him. Sure, they could use the radio to request a rescue, but would they be able to describe where they were? Plafker would put those concerns out of his mind, though, and get to work setting up the spike camp.

  A typical two-person camp consisted of two straight-sided military-style tents, one for sleeping and one for cooking. (The tents were often military-surplus items.) To save weight, they never brought tent poles. Instead, they’d cut willow branches and lash them together to make tent frames. It could be tedious work, especially when it was rainy and cold. Then they would set up the two-way radio, often an even more tedious process. The radio had a long antenna, a wire that had to be strung from tree limbs, if possible, for best reception.

  The men slept in sleeping bags on air mattresses, ate meals heated on stoves fueled by white gas and had gas lanterns to see by at night. Each morning they would venture out carrying a belt with the usual geology tools, including a rock hammer, compass, level and notebook. But they’d also carry a heavy backpack stuffed with other equipment, food and safety supplies like emergency blankets and signal flares. And they’d carry a weapon for protection against bears. Plafker sometimes hauled fifty pounds in his pack, and throughout the day the load tended to get heavier as he chipped off rock samples to take back.

  They’d head off mapping each morning, working together or separately, depending on the circumstances. The idea was to make forays as far as they could go and safely return by the end of the day. When the area had been fully surveyed, it would be time to break camp, call in the airplane and wait for the familiar drone of its engine coming back to pick them up.

  Some survey geologists didn’t really care what they ate or how comfortable their camp was. Others paid more attention to the details, especially the food. Plafker was one of the latter. While hardly a gourmand, he made the most of mealtime. His favorite backpacking food was the military C ration, which the Survey bought in bulk on the cheap. It always seemed that the rations were five or ten years old—perhaps that was one reason they were so inexpensive, Plafker thought—but as the food was military grade, age didn’t seem to affect it. He always brought a large bottle of Tabasco with him into the field to improve the taste.

  The thing about C rations was that they were totally self-contained. That appealed to Plafker’s sense of order. The army thought of everything. The rations included some kind of canned main dish—pork and beans, maybe, or spaghetti and meatballs—hard crackers, a little container with a buttery spread, even a dessert of some kind, a thick cookie or fudge-like substance. They also contained powdered coffee, sugar and powdered creamer, matches and a wad of toilet paper. Some of them even had four-packs of cigarettes. Those were especially useful for trading with the bush pilots, almost all of whom smoked. Plafker found he could easily swap his cigarettes for an extra dessert.

  The main dish could be eaten cold, if necessary, but Plafker was soon initiated into the ways of heating it up. Later in his career, when the Survey started using helicopters to get into the backcountry, heating the food was relatively simple as long as the chopper was around. You’d take an oil filter wrench—basically a band of steel attached to a long handle—wrap it around the can of pork and beans or whatever and hold it in the helicopter engine’s exhaust for a minute. Then you’d turn it around and hold the other end in the exhaust for another minute. That was it; your food was piping hot. Timing was everything, though. Keep it in the hot exhaust for too long and the can was liable to explode, sending hot beans and franks out like shrapnel.

  But in the days before helicopters, heating a C ration was more work. Plafker treated it like a ritual and got very good at it. First he’d take a few small rocks and arrange them in a circle, creating a mini fire ring. He’d tear up the heavy cardboard container that the ration came in, as well as the lighter boxes that held some of the individual items. He’d set it all up in a pile in the middle of the ring and add some of the toilet paper as kindling. Then he’d light it with the matches provided. If done just right, the fire would last just long enough to heat the main dish and a cup of coffee.

  Plafker teamed with Miller a lot and came to appreciate the older man’s skill at working in the backcountry. But Miller was one of the Spartan geologists. He didn’t really care about food. To him, a meal was just sustenance—all you needed was enough to keep you going so you could do your job. It didn’t matter what it was as long as it filled you up.

  What Miller cared most about was getting the fieldwork done right. He could be a taskmaster, especially if the weather was good. He would insist that they stay in the field for as long as possible rather than taking a day or two off back in Cordova. During one string of blue-sky weather, he and Plafker worked a month straight. And this being southern Alaska, where in summer the sun rose early in the morning and didn’t set until 10 or 11 at night, the days could be long ones. Plafker, who was in excellent shape, found the work exhausting, and not just physically. Keeping track of all that they were observing, recording and collecting, and doing it day after day, was mentally tiring. But Miller seemed to relish it.

  Miller was no daredevil, but he would go up or down any creek necessary to get the needed information about the geology of the landscape so that his maps were accurate. Plafker went up and down many creeks with him, and it was usually an adventure, with all their equipment and supplies loaded onto an inflatable boat. If they were headed downstream and the rapids didn’t seem too bad, they’d jump in and paddle themselves. But if they knew the river was rough, or if they were headed upstream, they would attach lines fore and aft and guide the boat from the shore. It was a tried-and-true way of doing things, but things could go wrong. The boat might get tossed in rapids, or a line might break. Miller, undaunted, would press on.

  Over three years, Plafker learned a lot—about working in the backcountry, and about geology. He’d spend the summers in Alaska, gathering data, and the rest of the year back home in the Bay Area with Ruth and L
inda. At the office in Menlo Park, he would be busy writing reports, making maps and planning fieldwork for the next year. There was nothing more satisfying, he thought, than finishing a map of an area he’d surveyed, having filled it in with different colors keyed to the types of rocks he’d found, then looking at it and realizing that, geologically speaking, he knew everything about the area that it was possible to know, because he had walked the land himself.

  He looked forward to returning to Alaska again in the summer of 1956. But Ruth had become pregnant again and gave birth to a boy, Gary, late in 1955. Maybe, Plafker thought, this wasn’t the ideal job after all. With two young children he had to consider finding a job that paid better than his government salary. With his developing expertise, he knew just the place to look: an oil company.

  —

  In the 1950s, Chevron, one of the successor companies that had followed the breakup of Standard Oil four decades before, was aggressively looking for oil throughout Central and South America. The company was hoping to replicate the success it had had in Venezuela, where it had discovered the huge Boscán oil field near Maracaibo right after World War II. They had a need for experienced geologists like Plafker, who was quickly hired. The pay was better, and, because he was working for a company and overseas, there were perks like bonuses and housing allowances.

  Plafker had first been sent to Guatemala. On the surface at least, the country at the time was largely peaceful—a military junta had deposed the left-leaning government in 1954 in a coup engineered by the US Central Intelligence Agency. Guatemala’s long and brutal civil war, with its death squads and other means of government repression, wouldn’t begin until 1960. George and Ruth had a large comfortable house in Guatemala City for their growing family—their third child, Jordan, was born while they were there—and a cook, a gardener and a couple of housekeepers to help.

  The fieldwork in Guatemala wasn’t all that different from what Plafker had done in Alaska, the main change being the surroundings—tropical jungle versus subarctic forest. Plafker worked with mostly Guatemalan crews, and between dealing with them and taking Spanish lessons when he was back from the field he quickly mastered the language.

  The main problem, it seemed, was that Guatemala appeared to have precious little oil. In three years of mapping, Plafker never found much in the way of promising formations. So in 1959 he was shifted to Bolivia, where, although the country’s petroleum industry had been nationalized for years, foreign companies had recently been allowed once again to prospect for oil. The family moved to Cochabamba, a lovely old city high in the Andes famous for having the best corn beer, or chicha, in Bolivia. It was a good base of operations for exploring for oil-bearing formations in the llanos, the large lowland basin to the east.

  It was out in these lowlands that Plafker ran into some trouble. He had been working in the office in Cochabamba, but his boss wanted to see what field camps were like. So they took a helicopter to the town of Todos Santos, not far from where a field team was working. The helicopter dropped them off and then left to ferry some supplies to the men at their field camp, but upon returning the pilot clipped a guy wire on a bridge. The chopper crashed and burned, killing the pilot. It was a horrible turn of events, and they had had to call to Cochabamba and tell Chevron higher-ups what had happened and request another helicopter to come and get them out. The helicopter couldn’t come until the next day, so Plafker and his boss went to a bar-restaurant to have a drink and get something to eat.

  They were minding their own business—while knocking back a few beers to ease the pain of a long, terrible day—when a very drunk bar patron made an offensive remark about gringos, clearly aimed at them. Plafker, who was in no mood to put up with insults and who by then spoke impeccable Spanish, told the man in no uncertain terms to shut up. The man didn’t, and punches were thrown. Plafker knocked his antagonist out, but someone called the police. The next thing he knew, Plafker was in a bare-bones jail cell. A short while later the police threw another man in with him—his victim from the bar. The man was now conscious, but mumbling in Spanish so incoherently that Plafker couldn’t make out what he was saying. Fortunately he was so drunk he had no idea that he was now sharing the cell with the man who had knocked him out.

  Plafker spent the night on the floor of the jail cell—it lacked basic amenities like a mattress—next to the man. The next day, Chevron hastily added a passenger, a lawyer familiar with the justice system in central Bolivia, to the helicopter flight. After some cajoling conversation from the lawyer, and an exchange of pesos, Plafker was set free.

  Aside from that night in jail, Plafker’s experience in Bolivia had been a good one. He liked Cochabamba and enjoyed the fieldwork down in the lowlands. He still hadn’t found much oil, but he’d learned a lot more geology. He was finding that his scientific education never really ended—there were always new things to see and discover. And one thing he discovered in Bolivia would help shape his thinking years later.

  In school, Plafker had learned, like everyone else, about the similarities between the coasts of South America and Africa, about Alfred Wegener and the theory of continental drift and about the more general issue of how the mountains and continents formed and changed. After years when the idea that the continents moved had been out of favor, especially among American scientists, there was now a renewed debate about the subject. Plafker wasn’t aware of all the details of the new evidence that was being uncovered—he was a field geologist, not a geophysicist—but he knew that now a growing number of scientists could be considered mobilists rather than stabilists.

  He’d always been convinced, from those clam broth and beer–fueled field trips with A. C. Hawkins, that it was important to see things firsthand. His work in Alaska and in Guatemala had reinforced the view that there was no substitute for being on the ground, in the field. In the field in Bolivia he’d seen things that had made him think more about the continents. And he began to believe that Wegener had been on the right track.

  While examining sedimentary rocks in the eastern Andes foothills, Plafker had come across dropstones. These were rocks, sometimes little more than pebbles, sometimes the size of boulders, that were embedded in layers of much finer sediments. It was as if when the region was covered in water and the sediments were building up, these rocks had been dropped into them. In fact, geologists knew that that is one way dropstones occur—they are picked up by glaciers, become frozen in the ice and carried along and then, as the front of the glacier calves off, form icebergs, eventually dropping out as the ice melts.

  The problem, Plafker realized, was where had the glaciers been that had done this? They had to have come from the east, but to the east was only more lowland in Bolivia and Brazil. But if South America and Africa had once been one—if the South Atlantic Ocean had yet to form—perhaps the glaciers could have come from there, or even from what is now Antarctica. The dropstones seemed like obvious evidence that the continents moved, that the earth’s surface was not static. Plafker was well on his way to becoming a mobilist.

  He would try to talk about what he was seeing with the other geologists he was working with. But they were largely uninterested. Because they worked for an oil company, they had a focused approach to geology. They wanted to know if a certain rock formation had the potential to hold oil or gas, and, if so, whether there was enough so that getting it out of the ground would be a profitable venture. Beyond that, Plafker came to understand, they didn’t really dwell on whether certain rocks had once been somewhere else, or how they had gotten to where they were now.

  Plafker, on the other hand, was intrigued by these sorts of things. Perhaps oil work was not for him, he thought. But it paid better than the Geological Survey.

  All of this was on his mind in 1961 when events conspired to alter his career once again.

  Chevron called an all-hands meeting in Bogotá, Colombia. The company was going to pull out of the region, Plafker and others were told. We have all this oil in the Gulf of
Mexico that we can get for $3.00 a barrel, they said. Saudi Arabia has most of the rest, which they can get for $1.50 a barrel. How can we compete with that in places like South America?

  They offered Plafker a couple of options. He could transfer to Chevron’s office in Oklahoma City, where he would work on the subsurface geology of the many oil and gas wells they had there. The idea of moving to the mountainless middle of the United States and working in an oil patch was less than appealing. Or, Chevron told him, you could work for our partner, Shell, which is exploring for oil in Libya, in North Africa. That sounded much more interesting to Plafker, although working for Shell, a Dutch company, would mean less in pay and perks.

  He was mulling over the idea of moving to Libya when a letter arrived from Don Eberlein, his former boss at the Geological Survey’s Alaska branch. It contained bad news. Don Miller, Plafker’s old mentor, had died in Alaska in August. He and an assistant, Bob MacColl, had drowned in the Kiagna River, on the north side of the Chugach Mountains. Miller’s luck, it seemed, had run out.

  The letter included a few details, which Plafker fleshed out later. Miller and MacColl had been working in the area and had chosen to go down the Kiagna, a north-flowing glacier-fed river about 150 miles northeast of Cordova, mapping rock exposures along the way. Miller was traveling the same way he had with Plafker. The two men had loaded supplies and equipment in an inflatable boat, tied ropes to it and guided it down the river. But they also had access to a helicopter to move them from one locale to another if needed.

  After a reconnaissance flight in the copter in early August, Miller, ever cautious, had decided that it would be safe to travel only through the lower end of one of the deep canyons along the Kiagna, as the river was running too high elsewhere. The helicopter had dropped the two men at the canyon’s lower end, landing on a gravel bar in the middle of the river.