I drove across the Bay Bridge this morning, as did many other people. Many other people did the same at that time of morning twenty years ago today as well. It was a normal drive to them; they had no idea that they wouldn't be able to drive back the way they came for their evening commute. True, I couldn't say for sure that I knew I'd be able to drive back that way this year, but with the events of twenty years ago on my mind, I think I was more aware of the possibility that it could happen again at some point in the future, near or far. I suspect that other drivers on the Bridge were thinking about it more than they might have on any other day as well.
I can't know for certain, but I suspect that this anniversary was far more on the mind of the City at large than the 1906 anniversary was, for reasons of time and experience. Loma Prieta was, after all, a smaller earthquake that didn't completely destroy the City, but it was, in the grand scheme of things, recent, and it simultaneously highlighted what an overall smaller quake can still do to a modern city, and how everyday people can be absolutely heroic in their attempts to save lives and stave off more damage. It is still a shared experience among many people here (and even those who weren't here at the time surely know people who were), rather than a historic commemoration at which the few remaining survivors are revered as living monuments. It is still very much a living memory, a community disaster.
And the City formally approached it in a way that reached into communities, rather than as a ceremony to only draw out the devoted. Specifically, street fairs with a theme of earthquake/disaster awareness and preparedness happened in four areas of the City (Mission, Marina, Bayview, and Sunset), to be followed up by more informal block parties. This did not strike me as the most intuitive way to commemorate a disaster in which 63 people died, but I still volunteered to help out. After spending the day in the Marina handing out emergency preparedness activity workbooks and painting little kids' faces, though, I think I got the idea. Earthquakes effect the whole community, and the community does need to discuss them to figure out how to best survive individually and as a group. Treating quakes like the boogeyman, like something only to be talked about in a Very Serious Environment, isn't going to promote open discussion. The fair environment, initially jarring though it was, seemed to be an effective casual space to discuss personal experiences (I heard snippets of so many people's stories of what they were doing when the quake hit - and a guy from channel 4 news seemed outright disappointed when I told him I wasn't here at the time and thus didn't have my own story, since he figured I would've had an interesting little kid perspective on it), as well as a place where people could start actively building their emergency kits from items at the various booths. The fair was not a celebration of the earthquake, but of the ability of people to withstand it and resultantly know even better what to do in the event of the next one.
The fair was followed up by a more solemn ceremony, with a set of speakers including the chief of the San Francisco Fire Department, the Marina District Supervisor, and Mayor Gavin Newsom. The theme was remembering those who had died and praising those who did so much to save lives. The ceremony also served as a dedication of a new monument to the victims, survivors, and emergency workers of Loma Prieta. The monument itself consists of the brass nozzle from the fireboat Phoenix, which saved the Marina District by pumping baywater through portable hydrants. It isn't installed yet, but was placed atop its eventual location for today's events. Both the printed program and the speeches expressed the hope that the Marina Earthquake Monument will become a sort of "21st century Lotta's Fountain," echoing the post-1906 gathering place. Yearly October 17th ceremonies seem to be the plan, though I do have to wonder how successful they'll be. The 1906 ceremony evolved from the Fountain being a central meeting place. The Phoenix's nozzle was certainly central in 1989, but the gathering of crowds wasn't. I do hope that the annual meetings take off, however, and that they continue to be an environment in which people can openly discuss what they'll do when the next one hits, as they did today.
Some other things about today's ceremony echoed the 1906 ceremony I attended in April. Everyone sang again, the same song "San Francisco" as has been a staple at Lotta's Fountain for so long. I don't think I was surprised that the same song was used, though I did find it interesting that the same thing was used to touch the living memory earthquake as to the largely historical one. There was also a definite push to get things said before the minute of the quake, so that it could be set aside from the rest of the ceremony. But where the minute of 5:12 AM on April 18th echoed back to 1906 with silence, 5:04 PM on October 17th called Loma Prieta with noise. Mayor Newsom activated a fire siren mounted on the stage, and all the fire trucks collected around the Marina Green blasted their own sirens back. The fireboat Guardian spouted three high plumes of water back over the Bay, a display that served well as a visual representation of the sound. Once the blasting faded out, a bell that tolls whenever a firefighter is injured or killed was rung in a pattern that was at once quieter than the previous barrage of sirens, but more striking against its background noise level. It was as if the sirens were screaming, "This was our earthquake! We were hit hard, but it couldn't take us down, and what did go down came back! We are stronger than this disaster!" and then the bell added, "We still can't let it happen that way again."
As I walked back to my car after cleaning up the fair area, I went past the intersection of Beach and Divisidero, where the Marina fire started and hit hardest. The post-1989 buildings there are all solid and bright and without sign of past disasters. Behind them, the sunset backlit puffs and shreds of grayish cloud with shades of orange and red. It was a beautiful sunset, but in that context, I couldn't help but think it looked rather like a fire, fortunately constrained to the sky rather than touching the buildings below, but still reminding of a tangible past and a potential future.
Showing posts with label significant events. Show all posts
Showing posts with label significant events. Show all posts
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Time Warp: Destination 1906
Lockwood had to poke me that the Accretionary Wedge is stumbling back to its feet, but it was good timing for a poke, since the quarter has just ended, and I might actually have time to write things other than comments on the undergrad papers I've been grading. (More on my insane past quarter later.) Anyway, I was initially concerned that I wouldn't be able to think of a topic and come up with an even vaguely eloquent post by the end of the grace period for late entries.
And then I saw the actual topic. No need to brainstorm here! I'm sure that every single one of you who has followed my blog, sparse though it's been lately, knows where and when I'd take my time machine. My choice definitely does not, however, come from any sort of desire to watch the destruction of a major city and the combustion of thousands of lives within. The decision to set the time machine for San Francisco in April of 1906 comes from an intense interest in earthquakes as events and processes, a great love for the city in question, and a fascination with the development of the field of earthquake physics itself.
I'll admit right out that I am curious what it feels like to be in a M7.8 earthquake. So far, my personal experience maxes out at M5.4, which was entirely exciting and not at all terrifying in my book. I suspect M7.8 would be well past the boundary between excitement and fear, but I suppose I wouldn't be afraid of the idea of that fear if I were gearing up my time machine to experience it. Furthermore, the bigger quakes are the ones that get the most intensive study, and while my own models are currently producing things that, according to the length of the faults, might not top the mid-6 range, I'll eventually be dealing in 7-pointers, and I want to know what one is like. For this curiosity, a time machine is a preferable option to waiting for a real one, both because it eliminates the waiting to begin with, and also because it means we wouldn't need a new 7.8 to appease any seismologist who might have this same curiosity. Of course, there's bound to be another one sooner than later, geologically-speaking, but the longer we put the new one off, the more we come to know about the processes behind it, and the more we can prepare our cities and citizens. The old quake already did its damage, horrendous though it was.
And that brings me to another point - I would not want to be in San Francisco proper to experience this earthquake. Even if my time machine were to make me impervious to flying bricks and walls of flame, I'd still want to be waiting somewhere where I could see the fault rip its way down the peninsula. I once read an account of a woman in Idaho who watched a fault rip through her property. She described it as if the fault scarp were being painted across the landscape by a very fast brush. That definitely seems like some sort of juncture between fear and awe, and that is absolutely something I'd want to see. My odds of merely experiencing a non-anachronistic 7.8 are much higher than of me watching the fault break in the process of creating that 7.8. Once the rupture passed me by, however, I think I would want to get back to the City as fast as possible, to see what damage the earthquake alone did before the fires took over...and then I'd want to get back to safer ground quite quickly as well, to avoid being caught by the flames.
But I could see a surface rupture for so many other earthquakes. Why turn my time machine toward this one? That, I'll admit, comes from my feeling extremely attached to San Francisco - never mind that I've never lived there! In making my plans to jaunt back 103 years, I'd build in a little extra time before April 18th - maybe I'd show up at the beginning of the month - so that I could explore the old San Francisco before it got wiped off the map. There are plenty of words about it, but in describing the before and after case, whose prose wouldn't be biased by what they'd just gone through? And, of course, who would have known to take before photos, if they had no reason to expect an after? The 1906 earthquake might have been the first extensively photographed natural disaster, but pre-quake images are hard to come by. I'd want to spend time just wandering the place, as I explore places when I visit them now, getting to know the streets and buildings and characters as they were before their disruption. If I were allowed modern technology aside from my time machine, I might try to snap some photos. If not, I'd plan to blow through a sketchbook or two. I might also be tempted to try and get a seat (or, more likely, a place to stand in the gallery) at the infamous Metropolitan Opera showing of Bizet's Carmen on the evening of April 17th, both because of the infamy of the event, but also because I am still a music geek, switch of majors or not! I've never seen Carmen live, and were I to have the opportunity to see Caruso in it, well, that's an excitement I'd share with many of those 1906 San Franciscans. It might even be a strange way to lose track of my hindsight for a few hours - just so long as I was sure to get it back in time to get out to the fault trace!
When I say that I'd want to get out of danger in the City once the fire started, though, I do not mean I wish to zap myself immediately back to 2009. I would be willing to handle the discomfort of the survivor camps for the sake of historical and cultural understanding, but also as a way to wait for the less ominous aftermath. Before the 1906 earthquake, so very little was known about faults and how they work, and the still-nameless San Andreas Fault was thought to be a small discontinuity in rock type not extending beyond part of San Mateo County. I would love to get myself an in with the scientific community of the day and watch the progression from knowing nothing of the earthquake source to "do the earthquakes cause the faults, or do the faults cause the earthquakes?" to the oh-so-fundamental elastic rebound theory. I would be so excited to watch the faults of California get drawn in on the map for the first time, outlining mountain ranges, bounding geologic provinces, highlighting the network of hazard that we still strive to understand and mitigate today. And to be able to witness that while also observing the rebuilding of San Francisco...Definitely a time of wonder and excitement, even though it came out of tragedy.
I suppose that all means I'd be staying until 1910. A bit of an extended trip, in terms of humanity, but not even a blink in geologic time. And since a time machine could be set to return to the exact time and place from whence it came, it wouldn't even be a blink at all to the current world that includes my timeline. It might mean four years off from my research, but I'd come back from it with a closer connection to where what I'm doing comes from, both in terms of scientific roots and in terms of seeing first hand what these natural processes we study can do.
And then I saw the actual topic. No need to brainstorm here! I'm sure that every single one of you who has followed my blog, sparse though it's been lately, knows where and when I'd take my time machine. My choice definitely does not, however, come from any sort of desire to watch the destruction of a major city and the combustion of thousands of lives within. The decision to set the time machine for San Francisco in April of 1906 comes from an intense interest in earthquakes as events and processes, a great love for the city in question, and a fascination with the development of the field of earthquake physics itself.
I'll admit right out that I am curious what it feels like to be in a M7.8 earthquake. So far, my personal experience maxes out at M5.4, which was entirely exciting and not at all terrifying in my book. I suspect M7.8 would be well past the boundary between excitement and fear, but I suppose I wouldn't be afraid of the idea of that fear if I were gearing up my time machine to experience it. Furthermore, the bigger quakes are the ones that get the most intensive study, and while my own models are currently producing things that, according to the length of the faults, might not top the mid-6 range, I'll eventually be dealing in 7-pointers, and I want to know what one is like. For this curiosity, a time machine is a preferable option to waiting for a real one, both because it eliminates the waiting to begin with, and also because it means we wouldn't need a new 7.8 to appease any seismologist who might have this same curiosity. Of course, there's bound to be another one sooner than later, geologically-speaking, but the longer we put the new one off, the more we come to know about the processes behind it, and the more we can prepare our cities and citizens. The old quake already did its damage, horrendous though it was.
And that brings me to another point - I would not want to be in San Francisco proper to experience this earthquake. Even if my time machine were to make me impervious to flying bricks and walls of flame, I'd still want to be waiting somewhere where I could see the fault rip its way down the peninsula. I once read an account of a woman in Idaho who watched a fault rip through her property. She described it as if the fault scarp were being painted across the landscape by a very fast brush. That definitely seems like some sort of juncture between fear and awe, and that is absolutely something I'd want to see. My odds of merely experiencing a non-anachronistic 7.8 are much higher than of me watching the fault break in the process of creating that 7.8. Once the rupture passed me by, however, I think I would want to get back to the City as fast as possible, to see what damage the earthquake alone did before the fires took over...and then I'd want to get back to safer ground quite quickly as well, to avoid being caught by the flames.
But I could see a surface rupture for so many other earthquakes. Why turn my time machine toward this one? That, I'll admit, comes from my feeling extremely attached to San Francisco - never mind that I've never lived there! In making my plans to jaunt back 103 years, I'd build in a little extra time before April 18th - maybe I'd show up at the beginning of the month - so that I could explore the old San Francisco before it got wiped off the map. There are plenty of words about it, but in describing the before and after case, whose prose wouldn't be biased by what they'd just gone through? And, of course, who would have known to take before photos, if they had no reason to expect an after? The 1906 earthquake might have been the first extensively photographed natural disaster, but pre-quake images are hard to come by. I'd want to spend time just wandering the place, as I explore places when I visit them now, getting to know the streets and buildings and characters as they were before their disruption. If I were allowed modern technology aside from my time machine, I might try to snap some photos. If not, I'd plan to blow through a sketchbook or two. I might also be tempted to try and get a seat (or, more likely, a place to stand in the gallery) at the infamous Metropolitan Opera showing of Bizet's Carmen on the evening of April 17th, both because of the infamy of the event, but also because I am still a music geek, switch of majors or not! I've never seen Carmen live, and were I to have the opportunity to see Caruso in it, well, that's an excitement I'd share with many of those 1906 San Franciscans. It might even be a strange way to lose track of my hindsight for a few hours - just so long as I was sure to get it back in time to get out to the fault trace!
When I say that I'd want to get out of danger in the City once the fire started, though, I do not mean I wish to zap myself immediately back to 2009. I would be willing to handle the discomfort of the survivor camps for the sake of historical and cultural understanding, but also as a way to wait for the less ominous aftermath. Before the 1906 earthquake, so very little was known about faults and how they work, and the still-nameless San Andreas Fault was thought to be a small discontinuity in rock type not extending beyond part of San Mateo County. I would love to get myself an in with the scientific community of the day and watch the progression from knowing nothing of the earthquake source to "do the earthquakes cause the faults, or do the faults cause the earthquakes?" to the oh-so-fundamental elastic rebound theory. I would be so excited to watch the faults of California get drawn in on the map for the first time, outlining mountain ranges, bounding geologic provinces, highlighting the network of hazard that we still strive to understand and mitigate today. And to be able to witness that while also observing the rebuilding of San Francisco...Definitely a time of wonder and excitement, even though it came out of tragedy.
I suppose that all means I'd be staying until 1910. A bit of an extended trip, in terms of humanity, but not even a blink in geologic time. And since a time machine could be set to return to the exact time and place from whence it came, it wouldn't even be a blink at all to the current world that includes my timeline. It might mean four years off from my research, but I'd come back from it with a closer connection to where what I'm doing comes from, both in terms of scientific roots and in terms of seeing first hand what these natural processes we study can do.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Northridge At Fifteen
I don't actually remember Northridge. I was nine years old at the time, but I also happened to be living just outside of Washington DC at the time. January of 1994 was memorable, but mostly because it was single digit temperatures, the furnace broke in our house, and so much ice fell out of the sky that my friends and I literally ice skated on the front lawn on Super Bowl Sunday. I'm sure I did hear about the earthquake in Los Angeles at some point, but I don't actually remember it.
It seems like there isn't a whole lot of remembering going on in the media today, either. The LA Times website has a photo gallery, but it's not a top-story link, and it wasn't in the print edition. They did run a short story about building codes, specifically about how soft first story buildings are bad, but the article was rather impersonal to my mind. Cal State Northridge's website mentions nothing. Papers more local to me (which are, admittedly, not super close to Northridge) mention nothing. This strikes me as weird, because I know so many people who have Northridge stories. Granted, they don't just volunteer them; the stories tend to come out when I mention the quake specifically (as I often do, as an example of why blind thrust faults are very scary), or when I mention that I've never personally felt ground motion strong enough to scare me. Once the topic is breached, they seem glad to tell me where they were, exactly what they were doing, how it all felt. Their stories are generally quite detailed, particularly considering most of my friends were also pretty little at the time.
And yet, despite the details, it takes pulling to get those stories out. I'm wondering if that comes from the larger culture of the region, the whole image Southern California as sun-drenched carefree paradise and home to the stars. What could possibly go wrong here? We don't have wildfires! We don't have earthquakes! Because if we let anyone know that we do, nobody will come here anymore. For these reasons, I really shouldn't have been surprised that media coverage of the anniversary has been unimpressive. The annual ceremony at Lotta's Fountain this most certainly is not.
I think the stories need to stay out there. They should be collected and available. They shouldn't be allowed to leave the public consciousness. Sure, they may reside in the minds of people who were here, but to everyone who has moved out here in the past fifteen years, what about them? As a relative newcomer to the West Coast myself, I wouldn't have heard the personal details unless, as I said, I started the conversation about them. The information needs to be out there, not to scare people, but to keep them informed and safer. Stories about, say, 1906 might be ample and fascinating, but that's a different city and a different age and a much bigger earthquake. The Los Angeles of 1994 was not that drastically different from now, and Northridge therefore shows the effect of a quake on a modern city. Not to mention that it shows that you don't need The Big One in order to still be Big Enough. How can anyone prepare if they're only hearing the scientific side of what we're in for, rather than the personal side as well?
Last week, after the 4.5, the LA Times ran a short article about how 2008 had more moderate-sized quakes than 2007, and how it was the most seismically active year since 1999 (which included the 7.1 Hector Mine quake and its aftershock sequence). My immediate wonder was if this means that any stress shadows left behind by Landers, Hector Mine, and Northridge are starting to dissipate. It is, of course, far too early to say if this will be a continuing trend, and no seismologist who cares about his or her reputation is going to use those figures to predict anything. But let's say, for argument's sake, that seismicity continues to be higher in the next few years. Shouldn't we be trying to pull people's awareness out of that post-Northridge stress shadow as well?
It seems like there isn't a whole lot of remembering going on in the media today, either. The LA Times website has a photo gallery, but it's not a top-story link, and it wasn't in the print edition. They did run a short story about building codes, specifically about how soft first story buildings are bad, but the article was rather impersonal to my mind. Cal State Northridge's website mentions nothing. Papers more local to me (which are, admittedly, not super close to Northridge) mention nothing. This strikes me as weird, because I know so many people who have Northridge stories. Granted, they don't just volunteer them; the stories tend to come out when I mention the quake specifically (as I often do, as an example of why blind thrust faults are very scary), or when I mention that I've never personally felt ground motion strong enough to scare me. Once the topic is breached, they seem glad to tell me where they were, exactly what they were doing, how it all felt. Their stories are generally quite detailed, particularly considering most of my friends were also pretty little at the time.
And yet, despite the details, it takes pulling to get those stories out. I'm wondering if that comes from the larger culture of the region, the whole image Southern California as sun-drenched carefree paradise and home to the stars. What could possibly go wrong here? We don't have wildfires! We don't have earthquakes! Because if we let anyone know that we do, nobody will come here anymore. For these reasons, I really shouldn't have been surprised that media coverage of the anniversary has been unimpressive. The annual ceremony at Lotta's Fountain this most certainly is not.
I think the stories need to stay out there. They should be collected and available. They shouldn't be allowed to leave the public consciousness. Sure, they may reside in the minds of people who were here, but to everyone who has moved out here in the past fifteen years, what about them? As a relative newcomer to the West Coast myself, I wouldn't have heard the personal details unless, as I said, I started the conversation about them. The information needs to be out there, not to scare people, but to keep them informed and safer. Stories about, say, 1906 might be ample and fascinating, but that's a different city and a different age and a much bigger earthquake. The Los Angeles of 1994 was not that drastically different from now, and Northridge therefore shows the effect of a quake on a modern city. Not to mention that it shows that you don't need The Big One in order to still be Big Enough. How can anyone prepare if they're only hearing the scientific side of what we're in for, rather than the personal side as well?
Last week, after the 4.5, the LA Times ran a short article about how 2008 had more moderate-sized quakes than 2007, and how it was the most seismically active year since 1999 (which included the 7.1 Hector Mine quake and its aftershock sequence). My immediate wonder was if this means that any stress shadows left behind by Landers, Hector Mine, and Northridge are starting to dissipate. It is, of course, far too early to say if this will be a continuing trend, and no seismologist who cares about his or her reputation is going to use those figures to predict anything. But let's say, for argument's sake, that seismicity continues to be higher in the next few years. Shouldn't we be trying to pull people's awareness out of that post-Northridge stress shadow as well?
Saturday, December 6, 2008
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?
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?
Thursday, June 19, 2008
June Sixteenth
One year ago Monday, I flipped my car off the freeway and was certain at the time that I wasn't going to survive the wreck.
This Monday, I graduated from UC Riverside with a Master of Arts degree in music composition.
Both of these things are kind of hard for me to believe, in a way, though both for different reasons. I still think about that accident almost every day, but considering how active I am now, driving and not suffering any residual pain, it's kind of hard to consider that it really truly happened, even if I remember all the details so clearly. And it's hard to believe it's already been a whole year, because I still remember it all so well. And as for graduation, after two years of school that became increasingly intense with each quarter, it's hard to believe that it's over (for that department, at least), rather than it's going to get even more intense. Being allowed to stick the letters "M.A." after my name if I feel like it seems almost anticlimactic after all that work.
I obviously never expected the accident. Who would? It took such a short time to occur, and yet changed my summer and my life and work since then in an enormous way. But I always expected that I would earn the Master's in music - and that's ultimately not changing my life nearly as much as I thought it would. I went into it knowing it would be the next step to making myself a better composer who was more likely to get a job in the field. But I'm coming out of it into a totally different discipline, not to the job world or to a music PhD. I certainly didn't expect that before the accident, for all I was fascinated by the local geology, but now that I've started working on it, I'm certainly glad for the change of course. I don't know if I really would have thought in earnest about switching if not for the shakeup that was that wreck. Can I be glad about a effect of an event, while still loathing the event itself? I suppose so, weird though it may be.
This Monday, I graduated from UC Riverside with a Master of Arts degree in music composition.
Both of these things are kind of hard for me to believe, in a way, though both for different reasons. I still think about that accident almost every day, but considering how active I am now, driving and not suffering any residual pain, it's kind of hard to consider that it really truly happened, even if I remember all the details so clearly. And it's hard to believe it's already been a whole year, because I still remember it all so well. And as for graduation, after two years of school that became increasingly intense with each quarter, it's hard to believe that it's over (for that department, at least), rather than it's going to get even more intense. Being allowed to stick the letters "M.A." after my name if I feel like it seems almost anticlimactic after all that work.
I obviously never expected the accident. Who would? It took such a short time to occur, and yet changed my summer and my life and work since then in an enormous way. But I always expected that I would earn the Master's in music - and that's ultimately not changing my life nearly as much as I thought it would. I went into it knowing it would be the next step to making myself a better composer who was more likely to get a job in the field. But I'm coming out of it into a totally different discipline, not to the job world or to a music PhD. I certainly didn't expect that before the accident, for all I was fascinated by the local geology, but now that I've started working on it, I'm certainly glad for the change of course. I don't know if I really would have thought in earnest about switching if not for the shakeup that was that wreck. Can I be glad about a effect of an event, while still loathing the event itself? I suppose so, weird though it may be.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Accretionary Wedge #9: Significant Geologic Events
Welcome to the ninth (late night!) edition of the Accretionary Wedge, everybody's favorite geoblog carnival!
Today, 22 May, is the anniversary of the 1960 magnitude 9.5 Valdivia, Chile earthquake and its associated devastating tsunami, the largest ever recorded. I figured it would be an appropriate anniversary for posting a carnival of entries on significant geologic events, though I intended for the theme to encompass smaller and more personally-significant things in addition to (or, so it seems, in concordance with) the events that changed the world in some way.
What I didn't know when choosing today for posting was that the the Southern California ShakeOut Scenario, a hypothetical magnitude 7.8 rupture on the southern third of the San Andreas Fault, had today as its release date. This future event - because it is a when rather than an if - is already high on my personal list of most significant events, since fear of precisely this kind of thing got me into reading about things geological when I first moved from Virginia to California, and since that reading showed me why I have always had at least a background interest in the way the Earth works, and since that in turn lead to my whole crazy change of academic directions. This is one of the reasons the 1906 San Francisco quake fascinates me so much - that there will surely be reflections of it in what eventually happens on the southern San Andreas. I know more about the San Andreas now, its pattern of destruction is less mysterious to me than it was in 2006, and it will be a focus in my MS work, but this kind of disaster scenario still scares me. I'm hoping that, if it happens during my lifetime, it will be significant to me because of understanding and survival, not because it's my last geologic event. Yikes.
But enough about me. There was a prolific response to this theme, with discussions of events long in the past to events personally experienced, precisely the kind of response for which I hoped. Enjoy!
The Lost Geologist understandably has trouble picking a single most significant event, when there are things like meteorite impacts and global glaciations to consider, but he ultimately focuses on the personal realization that Everything is Interconnected.
Callan Bentley of NOVA Geoblog writes a kind of meta-Accretionary-Wedge post, considering two such formations, one west coast and one east. This comparison of California and DC deepened his perspective on his local geology, and highlight the message that Geology Repeats Itself.
Tuff Cookie, of Magma Cum Laude, is also a fan of subduction zones. The subduction of the Farallon Plate is fascinating in and of itself, but is particularly important to Tuff Cookie because it created Utah's High Plateaus, the stuff of which Senior Theses are made.
Living through a major earthquake, particularly if one came close to not making it through, is a scary kind of significant. Kim, of All My Faults Are Stress Related, has every good reason to reprise her Loma Prieta story from Accretionary Wedge #2.
Andrew Alden also has a chillingly cautionary Loma Prieta story in his Oakland Geology Blog, which describes how the Quake of '89 permanently changed the city of Oakland, and his personal connection with earthquakes.
Over at Geology Happens, the runoff from the Rockies is both a herald of spring and a show of the power of big water.
Despite her emphatic declaration that she refuses to pick one out of her set of pet geologic events, Green Gabbro's Maria focuses on the scouring of Fossil Gorge, a 1993 Mississippi River flood that exposed a 375 million year old ecosystem on the one hand, while engulfing hapless Iowan buildings on the other.
Hypocentre's post leaves the Earth itself, though not without taking a chunk of the planet along. He cites the impact that formed the Moon as being key to the development of the Earth's rotation, core, tides, and tectonics.
Silver Fox, ofLooking for Detachment, also had some trouble narrowing the prompt down to a single event, or group of events. In the end, though, she cites the tectonic shaping of the American West, which in turn shaped her geological career and the place she calls home.
On a similar train of thought, Geotripper also had a hard time narrowing things down, but came back to the formation of the Grand Canyon as being an event that shaped a career in addition to a landscape. What a fantastic place for a first ever geology field trip, if I do say so myself!
Brian, of Clastic Detritus, is also taken with the American West, though in its Cretaceous wet stage, rather than its current desert state. He describes the Western Interior Seaway, the paleogeographic puzzle it poses, and the geological epiphany that puzzle-solving was for him.
Ole Nielsen, of Olelog, goes beyond the alteration of an entire city to the near annihilation of the Earth's entire human population. If the eruption of Mt. Toba had been any bigger, who knows if any of us would have had ancestors enough left to be sure that we would be here blogging today.
And that's all for this time, folks! Thanks for the excellent entries! Next month's wedge is, I believe, going to be hosted by John van Hoesen, at Geologic Musings in the Taconic Mountains, so keep an eye peeled over there for the next prompt and deadline!
Today, 22 May, is the anniversary of the 1960 magnitude 9.5 Valdivia, Chile earthquake and its associated devastating tsunami, the largest ever recorded. I figured it would be an appropriate anniversary for posting a carnival of entries on significant geologic events, though I intended for the theme to encompass smaller and more personally-significant things in addition to (or, so it seems, in concordance with) the events that changed the world in some way.
What I didn't know when choosing today for posting was that the the Southern California ShakeOut Scenario, a hypothetical magnitude 7.8 rupture on the southern third of the San Andreas Fault, had today as its release date. This future event - because it is a when rather than an if - is already high on my personal list of most significant events, since fear of precisely this kind of thing got me into reading about things geological when I first moved from Virginia to California, and since that reading showed me why I have always had at least a background interest in the way the Earth works, and since that in turn lead to my whole crazy change of academic directions. This is one of the reasons the 1906 San Francisco quake fascinates me so much - that there will surely be reflections of it in what eventually happens on the southern San Andreas. I know more about the San Andreas now, its pattern of destruction is less mysterious to me than it was in 2006, and it will be a focus in my MS work, but this kind of disaster scenario still scares me. I'm hoping that, if it happens during my lifetime, it will be significant to me because of understanding and survival, not because it's my last geologic event. Yikes.
But enough about me. There was a prolific response to this theme, with discussions of events long in the past to events personally experienced, precisely the kind of response for which I hoped. Enjoy!
The Lost Geologist understandably has trouble picking a single most significant event, when there are things like meteorite impacts and global glaciations to consider, but he ultimately focuses on the personal realization that Everything is Interconnected.
Callan Bentley of NOVA Geoblog writes a kind of meta-Accretionary-Wedge post, considering two such formations, one west coast and one east. This comparison of California and DC deepened his perspective on his local geology, and highlight the message that Geology Repeats Itself.
Tuff Cookie, of Magma Cum Laude, is also a fan of subduction zones. The subduction of the Farallon Plate is fascinating in and of itself, but is particularly important to Tuff Cookie because it created Utah's High Plateaus, the stuff of which Senior Theses are made.
Living through a major earthquake, particularly if one came close to not making it through, is a scary kind of significant. Kim, of All My Faults Are Stress Related, has every good reason to reprise her Loma Prieta story from Accretionary Wedge #2.
Andrew Alden also has a chillingly cautionary Loma Prieta story in his Oakland Geology Blog, which describes how the Quake of '89 permanently changed the city of Oakland, and his personal connection with earthquakes.
Over at Geology Happens, the runoff from the Rockies is both a herald of spring and a show of the power of big water.
Despite her emphatic declaration that she refuses to pick one out of her set of pet geologic events, Green Gabbro's Maria focuses on the scouring of Fossil Gorge, a 1993 Mississippi River flood that exposed a 375 million year old ecosystem on the one hand, while engulfing hapless Iowan buildings on the other.
Hypocentre's post leaves the Earth itself, though not without taking a chunk of the planet along. He cites the impact that formed the Moon as being key to the development of the Earth's rotation, core, tides, and tectonics.
Silver Fox, of
On a similar train of thought, Geotripper also had a hard time narrowing things down, but came back to the formation of the Grand Canyon as being an event that shaped a career in addition to a landscape. What a fantastic place for a first ever geology field trip, if I do say so myself!
Brian, of Clastic Detritus, is also taken with the American West, though in its Cretaceous wet stage, rather than its current desert state. He describes the Western Interior Seaway, the paleogeographic puzzle it poses, and the geological epiphany that puzzle-solving was for him.
Ole Nielsen, of Olelog, goes beyond the alteration of an entire city to the near annihilation of the Earth's entire human population. If the eruption of Mt. Toba had been any bigger, who knows if any of us would have had ancestors enough left to be sure that we would be here blogging today.
And that's all for this time, folks! Thanks for the excellent entries! Next month's wedge is, I believe, going to be hosted by John van Hoesen, at Geologic Musings in the Taconic Mountains, so keep an eye peeled over there for the next prompt and deadline!
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