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Part 1
The Earth Experienced
To live is to experience the Earth, for we are Earth’s children. Every atom of our bodies comes from the Earth. Every breath we take inhales and modifies Earth’s fragile atmospheric envelope.
The food and water by which our life is sustained are Earth’s products. Every object we touch, the clothes we wear, the cities we build, the houses where we live, the vehicles that we drive, the energy on which we depend – every substance we use and enjoy, everything from computer chips to cathedrals, comes from Earth’s materials. The light by which we see, the energy source for all the teeming world of plants on which all other life depends, radiates from our grandparent: Earth’s parent star, the Sun.
And we are children who never grow up, who remain lifelong dependents, who never leave home, who – like it or not – never escape our parent’s apron strings. How remarkable, then, that most of us give our parent so little attention, with scarcely a passing thought for Earth’s continuing support and well-being. How strange that we know and care so little for our family history.
The following section (Part 1) gives a parental portrait: the Earth experienced in its changing moods, its spasmodic violence, and its secret places. Reporters, historians, explorers, Earth scientists, and those better known for other achievements, provide us with a series of letters from home, reminding us of the old homestead, the place where we grew up and where – though sometimes forgetful of it – we still live.
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1
Eyewitness Accounts of Earth Events
Science, it is generally asserted, is concerned with facts. But ultimately there is nothing in Nature labeled “fact.” Facts represent human abstractions, and our recognition and understanding of facts are based upon individual perception and experience. To this extent geology includes both contrived encounters, which we call experiments, which are based on studies such as those in the laboratory where conditions and materials are carefully controlled, and also other encounters and experiences that can be gained only by firsthand contact with the Earth as it is, which generally means the rocks of the Earth’s crust. In this sense, the work of the field geologist provides the basic link between our knowledge and the materials and processes on which it is based.
The role of experiment on Earth science is limited by the problems of scaling down the Earth to appropriate models, the problem of physical states existing in the Earth but unattainable in the laboratory, and the time element, which is rarely attainable under laboratory conditions. For these and other reasons, laboratory experimentation plays a lesser role in geology than in most other sciences, although there is a rather different kind of “experimentation” which is also possible in the field, especially with such natural geological phenomena as the various agents of erosion and deposition, hot springs, geysers, and volcanoes, to take some obvious examples.
Geology has a twofold concern. It is concerned first with the present configuration and composition of the Earth, and second with the interpretation of the past history of the Earth. Field observations are of critical importance, because the recognition of earlier events in the history of the Earth depends heavily on an analysis of present composition and configuration of Earth materials, and the identification of the action of processes and laws observable in our existing environment. Here, again, time and scale are important elements. Catastrophes do indeed take place, but most processes that influence the crust of the Earth act almost imperceptibly. Unfortunately, nearly all the processes that we can observe (as opposed to those we can infer) are rapid ones, which play only a local or limited role in the overall development of the Earth’s crust. In spite of this limitation, such events and processes are still of great significance because they allow us to observe and compare multiple sequences of events in which various components and conditions may be analyzed, and in which a measure of prediction and experimentation is possible. Even the speed and extent of these processes have great significance.
Because most centers of population are deliberately established in areas remote from scenes of frequent terrestrial violence and instability, field observation frequently takes the geologist into distant and isolated areas. The areas included in the present accounts range from the Sahara Desert to the Antarctic, and the accounts themselves present fascinating differences in character and style.
1-1 Los Angeles Against the Mountains – John McPhee
In Los Angeles versus the San Gabriel Mountains, it is not always clear which side is losing. For example, the Genofiles, Bob and Jackie, can claim to have lost and won. They live on an acre of ground so high that they look across their pool and past the trunks of big pines at an aerial view over Glendale and across Los Angeles to the Pacific bays. The setting, in cool dry air, is serene and Mediterranean. It has not been everlastingly serene.
On a February night some years ago, the Genofiles were awakened by a crash of thunder – lightning striking the mountain front. Ordinarily, in their quiet neighborhood, only the creek beside them was likely to make much sound, dropping steeply out of Shields Canyon on its way to the Los Angeles River. The creek, like every component of all the river systems across the city from mountains to ocean, had not been left to nature. Its banks were concrete. Its bed was concrete. When boulders were running there, they sounded like a rolling freight. On a night like this, the boulders should have been running. The creek should have been a torrent. Its unnatural sound was unnaturally absent. There was, and had been, a lot of rain.
The Genofiles had two teen-age children, whose rooms were on the uphill side of the one-story house. The window in Scott’s room looked straight up Pine Cone Road, a cul-de-sac, which, with hundreds like it, defined the northern limit of the city, the confrontation of the urban and the wild. Los Angeles is overmatched on one side by the Pacific Ocean and on the other by very high mountains. With respect to these principal boundaries, Los Angeles is done sprawling. The San Gabriels, in their state of tectonic youth, are rising as rapidly as any range on earth. Their loose inimical slopes flout the tolerance of the angle of repose. Rising straight up out of the megalopolis, they stand ten thousand feet above the nearby sea, and they are not kidding with this city. Shedding, spalling, self-destructing, they are disintegrating at a rate that is also among the fastest in the world. The phalanxed communities of Los Angeles have pushed themselves hard against these mountains, an aggression that requires a deep defense budget to contend with the results. Kimberlee Genofile called to her mother, who joined her in Scott’s room as they looked up the street. From its high turnaround, Pine Cone Road plunges downhill like a ski run, bending left and then right and then left and then right in steep christiania turns for half a mile above a three-hundred-foot straightaway that aims directly at the Genofiles’ house. Not far below the turnaround, Shields Creek passes under the street, and there a kink in its concrete profile had been plugged by a six-foot boulder. Hence the silence of the creek. The water was now spreading over the street. It descended in heavy sheets. As the young Genofiles and their mother glimpsed it in the all but total darkness, the scene was suddenly illuminated by a blue electrical flash. In the blue light they saw a massive blackness, moving. It was not a landslide, not a mudslide, not a rock avalanche; nor by any means was it the front of a conventional flood. In Jackie’s words, “It was just one big black thing coming at us, rolling, rolling with a lot of water in front of it, pushing the water, this big black thing. It was just one big black hill coming toward us.”
In geology, it would be known as a debris flow. Debris flows amass in stream valleys and more or less resemble fresh concrete. They consist of water mixed with a good deal of solid material, most of which is above sand size. Some of it is Chevrolet size. Boulders bigger than cars ride long distances in debris flows. The dark material coming toward the Genofiles was not only full of boulders; it was so full of automobiles it was like bread dough mixed with raisins. On its way down Pine Cone Road, it plucked up cars from driveways and the street. When it crashed into the Genofiles’ house, the shattering of safety glass made terrific explosive sounds. A door burst open. Mud and boulders poured into the hall. We’re going to go, Jackie thought. Oh, my God, what a hell of a way for the four of us to die together.
The parents’ bedroom was on the far side of the house. Bob Genofile was in there kicking through white satin draperies at the panelled glass, smashing it to provide an outlet for water, when the three others ran in to join him. The walls of the house neither moved nor shook. As a general contractor, Bob had built dams, department stores, hospitals, six schools, seven churches, and this house. It was made of concrete block with steel reinforcement, sixteen inches on center. His wife had said it was stronger than any dam in California. His crew had called it “the fort.” In those days, twenty years before, the Genofiles’ acre was close by the edge of the mountain brush, but a developer had come along since then and knocked down thousands of trees and put Pine Cone Road up the slope. Now Bob Genofile was thinking, I hope the roof holds. I hope the roof is strong enough to hold. Debris was flowing over it. He told Scott to shut the bedroom door. No sooner was the door closed than it was battered down and fell into the room. Mud, rock, water poured in. It pushed everybody against the far wall. “Jump on the bed,” Bob said. The bed began to rise. Kneeling on it – on a gold velvet spread – they could soon press their palms against the ceiling. The bed also moved toward the glass wall. The two teen-agers got off, to try to control the motion, and were pinned between the bed’s brass railing and the wall. Boulders went up against the railing, pressed it into their legs, and held them fast. Bob dived into the muck to try to move the boulders, but he failed. The debris flow, entering through windows as well as doors, continued to rise. Escape was still possible for the parents but not for the children. The parents looked at each other and did not stir. Each reached for and held one of the children. Their mother felt suddenly resigned, sure that her son and daughter would die and she and her husband would quickly follow. The house became buried to the eaves. Boulders sat on the roof. Thirteen automobiles were packed around the building, including five in the pool. A din of rocks kept banging against them. The stuck horn of a buried car was blaring. The family in the darkness in their fixed tableau watched one another by the light of a directional signal, endlessly blinking. The house had filled up in six minutes, and the mud stopped rising near the children’s chins.
1-2 The Night the Mountain Fell – Gordon Gaskill
They say the animals knew. In that last peaceful twilight – Wednesday, October 9, 1963 – hares grew suddenly bold and, oblivious of passing men and automobiles, raced silently, intently, down the paved road – away from the lake. As darkness gathered, cows milled uneasily in their stalls, dogs whimpered, chickens stirred in their pens, unwilling to sleep. A couple watching television was irritated by the unnatural, noisy fluttering of their caged canary. Then the fluttering abruptly stopped: in its strange panic the bird had caught its head in the cage bars and strangled to death. Husband stared at wife: “Something’s going to happen! The dam …?”
Life or death this night in the small town of Longarone, in northeast Italy, would turn on a simple, single fact: how high up the hillsides of the river valley below the Vajont Dam you happened to be. All but those in the highest parts would soon die.
An engaged couple, due to marry in six days, had a slight difference of opinion. Giovanna wanted to go to the movies at Belluno, the provincial capital about 12 miles away, but her fiancé, Antonio, felt too tired and begged off. They separated for the night, he to his higher home, she to a lower one. Next morning he would be digging in the muddy waste where Giovanna, her family and home had disappeared, repeating endlessly, “If only I had taken her to the movies…. If only I had taken her to the movies.”
A teen-age boy astride his motorbike fidgeted with embarrassment as, from a window, his mother tried to talk him out of riding off to another village to see a girl. But from inside the house his father, remembering his own salad days, called out indulgently, “Oh, let him go!” The mother sighed, gave in and the boy rode off to safety – never to see home or parents again.
Visiting Longarone were three Americans of Italian descent, all staying in a low-lying little hotel. One of them, John De Bona, of Riverside, Calif. retired to his room – and never would be seen again. Two others, Mr. and Mrs. Robert De Lazzero, of Scarsdale, N.Y. had panted uphill nearly 150 steps to have dinner with his great-aunt Elisabetta, and two cousins. Shortly before ten, dinner over, they were about to walk back down to the hotel when Aunt Elisabetta said, “Don’t go yet. See, I’ve saved a special bottle of wine for you.” Somewhat reluctantly, they stayed on a little longer. They were lucky.
For the clocks of Longarone would never strike 11 on this night. Just before that hour Longarone and the hamlets clustering near it would be erased from the earth, and more than 2000 people would die in perhaps the world’s most tragic dam disaster.
Four years later the great new Vajont Dam had been both the pride and the fear of people living around Longarone, a sub-Alpine town not far south of the Austrian border. Flung across the nearby Vajont gorge – so deep and narrow that sunlight touched its bottom only fleetingly at noon – the d...
