Geological Morbid Curiosity

I completely failed to feel a magnitude 5.1 earthquake last night. A paleoclimatologist friend and I were at one of those paint your own pottery places making holiday gifts for relatives, and the only way we found out about the quake there, in absence of the internet, was a USGS text message and another message from an ethnomusicologist friend asking if I'd felt it. The quake was out near Ludlow, in the middle of the Mojave, a good 80 miles from Riverside. I was impressed that people here felt it at all, especially with all the faults and mountains between here and there, but apparently several thousand people still did. I was admittedly extremely disappointed by this, and kept harping on about it for the entire night.

My harping about not feeling it led to discussion of things we have experienced. While I can talk of bad Virginia winters (blizzards of '93 and '96, hideous ice storms of '94), my paleoclimatologist friend described her experiences with the Landers and Northridge earthquakes. Despite knowing full well the damage and injury that these earthquakes caused, I realized I was actually jealous that she'd been there and I was stuck on the east coast. I guess this explains why I'm a seismologist, huh?

And then, the conversation turned to the matter of whether or not all people who study active and potentially dangerous processes have some morbidly curious internal (or open) desire to experience that major dangerous process in person. It's not that we want to have anything to do with the loss of life and property that would come out of disastrous process of choice; some of the work we do is to try and avoid that loss! It's just curiosity about the actual process, and about wanting to know how much of the hypothesizing and modeling in our work would be comparable to the real thing.

My friend admitted that she's intensely curious to see what would happen if a large part of the Greenland ice sheet catastrophically collapsed into the ocean. And I admitted in turn that, even while being scared by that video of simulated wave propagation for the ShakeOut scenario, part of me does want to be here when the next Big One rips the San Andreas. I certainly would be terribly depressed to see that degree of earthquake damage up close - I wouldn't wish it on anyone even on my crankiest nastiest of sleep-deprived days, and I wouldn't want to experience the damage myself. The photos from 1906 that so fascinate me do so partly (even largely) because they're an unimaginable sort of horror. But yet, I admit to being extremely curious about what that degree of close-up shaking would feel like, and I'd love to see the surface rupture, and I'd particularly love to get a look at all the data that would come out of such a quake.

Do any of you geobloggers (or other readers) share this sort of morbid curiosity? If there were some assurance that your major/sudden/cataclysmic geologic process of choice wouldn't hurt anyone, or that you'd get to experience on a version of Earth otherwise devoid of civilization except for yourself, what do you have to admit you'd like to be there for?

Or are my friend and I the only ones, which makes us perhaps uncomfortably weird?

Danger danger danger!

Less than three hours after I posted lamenting how I have more photos of my car tempting the geological fates than of myself doing the same, the TA of my mineralogy class sent me this photo from this past weekend's trip to the San Onofre breccia at Dana Point, Orange County. (Entire entry about that trip coming soon.)



I laugh in your face, oh cautionary sign! How dare you try to thwart my efforts to poke the little bitty fault!

Off the freeway and into the fault trace...

I've really been enjoying reading all of the death-defying stories that have been posted around the geoblogosphere of late (though I hope it doesn't make me a bad person for enjoying accounts of dire peril from people I wouldn't want to see succumbing to that peril). It becomes quite evident that having a death wish, or at least not fearing death, comes with the territory of being a geologist. But then, does not having field experience with potential mortality attached inherently mark someone as a newbie to the field?

I think it does, at least in my case. The most "dangerous" thing I've done deliberately so far is park my car on a bunch of infamous faults. When I tell my friends in Virginia that I've done this, they get pretty freaked out; presumably, they don't understand how slim the odds of the fault rupturing in the few minutes my car is on it are. (And even if it were to go off while my car was there, I told them, if the car is parked, that would likely mean I would not be in it in the time, so the odds of me getting strike-slipped in half are even slimmer. They seemed moderately relieved.)

Here, we have a bad cameraphone photo of my car parked on the San Jacinto Fault in San Bernardino.

And here is my car on the San Andreas (with its convenient street sign), also in San Bernardino.

And this is my friend's car (which is the same model as mine, only darker gray), which she parked on the Calaveras Fault in Hollister, promptly after I said, "You'd better not park right on the fault."

But for this silliness, I did have a very serious very near death experience involving a car on the way to some geological activities. I was driving from Riverside to Soledad to meet a friend for a week-long road trip along the San Andreas. Just after getting off the terrifying California state route 46 and onto the apparently-safer US-101, strong wind shoved my car partway into the left lane. The problem was that another car was coming in that lane, so I corrected abruptly to avoid collision. I did, indeed, avoid a run-in with that car, but it turns out that I corrected too abruptly and ended up spinning off the freeway and rolling down a 15-foot embankment. I landed like this:

Amazingly, I had no injuries other than a pulled muscle in my neck, and we were still able to go on the road trip in my friend's car.

I think that any person would take stock of where they were in life and what they wanted to do with that chance to keep living after an incident like this. But chances are any sane person would think, "I nearly died heading to a geological site. Is this the safest thing for me to do with my life?" But me, I thought, "That road trip was the best thing I could have done after the accident. This really is what I want to study."

So there's hope for me yet in terms of geologically death-defying photographs.