EARTH MOVEMENTS

I want to end this story at a specific moment:  Monday, 12 May, 2008, at exactly 2.28 pm local time. The place is 942 miles west southwest of Beijing, in the capital of China's Sichuan province. Chengdu was a modern city of sky scrappers and ancient temples, universities and industry, home to 7 million people.  And one and one half seconds later almost all of that was destroyed.

The earth underfoot jerked and vibrated for four interminable minutes. Office and apartment towers were whipsawed back and forth until they crumbled. Eighty percent of the structures in Chengdu collapsed.

Some 90,000 humans were killed or fatally injured during those four minutes, including five thousand  three hundred children, most killed when their schools collapsed. Five million in all were left homeless. 

As such things are measured, the event was recorded as a 7.9 on the modified Richter scale, "Very Destructive" on the European Macro-Seismic scale,  and "Extreme" on the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale. The shaking produced 200,000 landslides across 170,000 square miles spread across three Chinese provinces. That was the end, which was a product of the middle of this story.

Some 66 million years ago, about the time the Chicxulub impact killed off the dinosaurs,  a 140 mile long single cohesive slab of magma was exposed near the surface of the Euro-Asian tectonic plate.  It cooled to 850 degrees Fahrenheit so quickly it's crystals were locked rigidly together. Over eons it was then buried under layer upon layer of sediment, until it was 12 miles below the surface.

Then, beginning about 10,000 years ago, new pressure from the north and west against the Chengdu Plain, bulldozed  up "...one of the world's most remarkable continental escarpments",  the 250 mile long Longmen Shan, or "Dragons Gate", Mountains (above). 

This northeast by southwest escarpment piled up 16,000 feet over less than 30 miles of width, directly above the long buried slab, while the pressure from the northwest grew and grew.

And when that 140 mile long slab of bedrock could no longer withstand the pressure, it snapped like a twig, fracturing at exactly 2:28pm and one and one half seconds, releasing the equivalent of 25,000 nuclear bombs, its destructive waves racing outward through the surrounding bedrock at 7,200 miles an hour, covering the 50 miles to Chengdu in one second , destroying that city and every town and village along it's way. 

What was squeezing the Dragon's Gate escarpment upward against the Chengdu Plain was the rising of the Tibetan Plateau, described by Andrew Alden, of About.com as what maybe   "...the largest and highest in all of geological history…."  It is an area five times the size of modern day France. 

The average elevation of the Plateau is 14,800 feet above sea level. It's 46,000 glaciers are the third largest supply of fresh water on the planet, which gives birth to seven of the world's greatest rivers;  the 2,000 mile long Indus in Pakistan, the 1,600 mile long Ganges in India, the 1,400 mile long Irrawaddy in Myanmar , the 2,700 mile long Mekong of Thailand and Vietnam, the 3,900 mile long Yangtse and 3,400 mile long Yellow rivers in China. 

The Tibetan Plateau has bulged because the entire Indian tectonic plate, 6,000 miles long by  2,000 miles wide and sixty-two miles thick, encompassing four billion six hundred thousand square miles of rock and earth has been slamming into the Eurasian plate at a speed of about 2 inches a year for the last fifty-seven million years.  

Like the crush ozone on a automobile,  the front bumper of India has crumpled and thickened on impact, producing first the Karakoram - or black gravel - mountains (above, center left) and secondly the Himalayan - or abode of snow - mountain range, including Mount Everest (above, left center).

 And because it was thinner and thus lighter, the collision was so fast it forced the Indian plate to subduct under the Tibetan Plateau, raising it up. 

It appears the Indian plate  did not "drift" into a collision with the Eurasian plate, but rather was pulled north 3,700 miles by two smaller plates carrying volcanic island arcs which India ran over. As those plates sank into the mantle they pulled the Indian plate northward, speeding it up in the process.   

By about 550 million years ago some 20% of the earth's surface - 39 millions square miles - was joined together into a supercontinent called Gondwana. It included the tectonic cratons of South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia,  Zeelandia, Arabia and India (with the Red Dot).  This chunk of the dry surface remain joined until the start of the Jurassic Age -  about 180 million years ago - when heat trapped beneath it's thick surface drove the individual cratons apart.   

And like the last act of our story, the first began with an earthquake, some 180 million years ago along the border of the Madagascar plate and the Indian Plate, as they both began to pull apart from Gondwana, some 3,500 miles south of where the story was to end, along the southern border of the Eurasian plate. Millions were thus condemned to suffer through the great Chengdu Earthquake of 12 May, 2008, because of the break up of Godwana 180 million years earlier. 

- 30 -

EARTH MOVEMENTS

I was thinking about ignorance yesterday, while watching the pictures out of Sichuan. On May 12, 2008, at exactly 2.28 pm and one second (2:28 am and one second in New York City ) beneath the mountains 56 miles West-northwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu, a chunk of bedrock 140 miles long and 12 miles deep, shattered. The result was a 7.9 magnitude earthquake, which produced four minutes of violent ground shaking, surface displacement of 29 feet and an estimated 50,000 dead. Officially this will be called the Wenchuan Earthquake, because giving it a name is a way of making such violence comprehensible.
*
Not far from epicenter of this hell on earth, on the border of Nepal and Tibet, the monolith of Mount Everest rises 29,035 feet above sea level. Scattered about its upper slopes are about 120 bodies of climbers who died too high up the mountain to justify their retrieval. And all of this – the earthquake, the 50,000 dead, Mount Everest , the border and the climbers - are all products of the same elemental force. And according to surveys most Americans have no idea what that force is.
*
In Susan Jacoby’s book, “The Age of American Unreason”, she recounts a conversation she overheard in a New York City bar shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in that city. First Man: “This is just like Pearl Harbor”. Second Man; “What is Pearl Harbor?” First Man; “That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War”. Ms. Jacoby blames the great “dumbing down” of America in large part on the overuse of the word “folks”. I’m not sure I can agree with her on the cause, but the effects are evident, especially in Iraq, a nation which, according to a 2006 National Geographic poll, 37% of young Americans can’t find on a map. Worse, according to the same survey, half of our young adults can’t even find New York!
*
According to Bob Wise, President of Alliance for Excellent Education, half of America’s high school students drop out before graduation perhaps in large part because half of those who do graduate are not given the skills to get a good job. AT&T has tried to answer the public’s demand for an end to “outsourcing American jobs” but can’t find 5,000 qualified customer service representatives in San Antonio, Texas. Their CEO Randall Stephenson, explained why the corporation felt the need in April to donate $100 million to help solve the failure of America’s schools. He said, “We’re not giving our children…all the opportunities they need to succeed.” Under the mantra of “No new taxes” our high school graduation rates have dropped to 18th place in the world, 15th for reading skills and 25th for math. Perhaps it is time to stop repeating empty phrases that we are “the greatest nation in the world” or proclaiming ourselves to be members of “the greatest generation” and start paying the price required to actually live up to those accolades.
*
According to Andrew Alden, of About.com, “The Tibetan Plateau is an immense upland…not just the largest, highest area in the world today …it may be the largest and highest in all of geological history….Nearly 100 million years ago, India separated from Africa…moving north at speeds of around (6 inches) per year...(and) about 55 million years ago…began to plow directly into the Asian continent…(So far it) has pushed more than (120 miles) into Asia, and its still moving at a pretty good clip.”
*
It is that collision that threw up the sea bed that lay between India and Asia, like the metal of two cars in a slow motion head-on crash. We know this because locked in the limestone, dolomite and silt stone which make up the rock atop the highest point on the Earth are the fossilized remains of trilobites that scuttled across that sea bed 60 million years ago. Now they have been crumpled 6 miles into the sky. It is that continuing collision that killed perhaps 50,000 people on May 12, and 240,000 in Tangshan, China in July of 1976 (in a 7.6 quake), and 9,300 people in a 1933 quake along the very same fault. And it matters not if you choose to deny this reality in favor religion or fantasy, because those people are still dead, and all of them died where and when they died because of the same underlying reason – what is called plate tectonics.
*
About eight million years ago the Himalayas rose high enough to first block the moist South west winds across the Indian Ocean. The wall of mountains created the seasonal monsoon rains that now feed two billion people across south-east Asia. And after the monsoons end each year those two billion people and another two billion across East Asia depend for their drinking water and crop irrigation upon the Ganges, Indus, Bahmaputra, Yangtze, Mekong, Yellow, and a thousand smaller rivers. And all those rivers – all of them - are fed by the so called “The Third Pole” of the Himalayas - 46,298 glaciers, large and small. In the 1970’s these glaciers covered 18,865 square miles. As of 2007 they covered 17,158 square miles. You may prefer to have faith in the fantasy’s offered by coal and oil companies, but the reality is that 4 billion human beings are being threatened with starvation because of one simple underlying reason - what is called global warming.
*
Today there are six times as many people alive as were living at the start of the Industrial revolution. There are 13 times as many people alive today as were alive when Columbus’ three tiny ships set out across the Atlantic. And there are now 20 times as many people walking the earth as those who might have seen Caesar Augustus parade in triumph through the streets of Rome. And the ratio amongst humanity of fools to thinkers has not changed much over all of that time. But education still helps to cut down on the general level of ignorance.

- 30 -