In a year in which Mother Nature has served notice to its terrestrial tenants with one natural disaster after another, Simon Winchester regrets his notoriety. Author of the best sellers Krakatoa and The Professor and the Madman, Winchester is an Oxford-educated writer and noted authority on natural disasters whose commentary has been sought on everything from last year’s South Asian tsunami to this fall’s Kashmir-centered quake.
Wired News recently sat down with Winchester to discuss his new book, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, disasters in the news, and the state of geology science.
Wired News: Why did you write this book?
Simon Winchester: In April 2006, it will be the hundredth anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco quake. In terms of science, it was a great tipping point. Up until that point, the principal human reaction to great catastrophes was to assume it was the work of God. Come 1906, we began to think of it rationally. It was a hinge point leading up to the discovery of seismology. I wanted to produce a book that would step back from the San Francisco quake and situate it in a modern context. For many Americans, pre-Katrina, it was considered the greatest natural disaster to affect the United States.
WN: Before seismology, geology was widely dismissed by those in other fields as a “stamp-collecting” science.
Winchester: With good reason. It was all fossils and rocks for such a long time. Other sciences were born of thinking. Geology is fieldwork and observation. This is why William Smith, the father of geology, was so ingenious to visualize and draw the first maps of hidden strata. The science’s development was also hindered by our own human difficulty to conceptualize geological time lines — grasping things that happened 800 million years ago.
WN: Does a 100-year-old quake matter to us?
Winchester: Sadly, yes. Not unlike 1906, we are currently experiencing a period of intense seismic activity. Seismology tells us it’s no coincidence. These events are highly interrelated triggers with their own cascading effects. The 1906 quake was preceded by one in Kashmir, halfway round the world, the year before. In 2004, the Bam, Iran, quake preceded this most recent one in Kashmir, but not before a remarkable series of tremors affected South America and Los Angeles just a few weeks prior. Seismic events, regrettably, do not happen in isolation.
WN: What does this tell us?
Winchester: Frankly, people who live on plate boundaries should watch out.
WN: Your book also presents the case for understanding local events in a global context.
Winchester: It’s interesting that Gaia theory, plate tectonics and space travel all emerged in the same historical moment. Just as the first photos of Earth from space made a compelling argument for human interdependence, tectonics really underscores our shared earthbound risks.
WN: In the United States, this year’s hurricane season has been especially tragic.
Winchester: People sometimes forget that America is a country without any ruins. There are some ghost towns, but as a young country, it has not experienced the sort of depredations which Rome, London and the great world cities have known. I sometimes wonder how a map of the United States will look in a few hundred years. From a certain perspective, constructing a city 20 feet below sea level, between a swamp and the ocean, would seem utter lunacy. Hence we now have this discussion about whether to rebuild New Orleans.
Then one has to wonder about San Francisco — one of the world’s most dangerous plate boundaries. I think in time Bay Area citizens will become more like the Japanese, who are models in this regard. They live not just with the engineering required of an earthquake zone, but an attitude commensurate with being prepared for that eventuality.
But, as we’ve seen, it’s not just about people responding or adapting to these possibilities — it’s about whether leaders will respond appropriately.
WN: What is the role of science here? What can we learn from seismology?
Winchester: It’s a question of recognizing what we don’t know. The science is incomplete. Geologists and seismologists still do not have answers to the biggest questions: What causes an earthquake, and what signatures of an impending quake — say, low-frequency waves — may be detectable. We know nothing at all about what we want to know most of all.
WN: How has this answer eluded scientists?
Winchester: It’s curious. Geology has suffered under the perception that it is not the science to which the finest minds might devote themselves most fruitfully. Quantum physics, mathematics, astronomy and other fields have all had a greater draw in the past — but the top minds are beginning to enter geology and geophysics now. It’s such a young science, but its profile and research funding have begun to grow in an unprecedented manner. At long last, geology is getting the recognition it deserves.
WN: But we’re still waiting on the eureka moment.
Winchester: The science of prediction is due for a breakthrough. But accuracy won’t come easily. It will be a very brave geologist who advises a mayor that an earthquake is on the way. And a very brave mayor with the nerve to call for a full evacuation.
WN: Scientists do not seem to enjoy much visibility in discussions around emergency planning.
Winchester: They don’t. For example, there is a potentially very dangerous seismic territory in the middle of America. The 1811 quake in New Madrid, Missouri, was the biggest in American history. To this day, there are little tremors in southern Missouri all the time. Recently, a woman at the U.S. Geological Survey commissioned a risk-assessment map of the two cities closest to this area, Memphis and St. Louis. There are fault lines all through Shelby County that are hugely dangerous. However, she has been unable to convince local authorities of the imminent risk in this area (making the situation even more dangerous).
We all live on top of geology, that’s a given. There’s an old saying that humankind exists on this Earth subject to geological consent, which can be revoked at any time, without notice.
