Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [57]
They couldn’t simply fly to the top because the summit was too high and the air too thin for ordinary helicopters. Plus the researchers themselves would need time to acclimatize to the altitude before starting the hardest part of their work. So instead of an easy ride in a chopper, they made nine trips over three days in a single-engine, ski-equipped Helio Courier airplane to airlift the fifteen members and all their gear to a base camp on the Quintino Sella Glacier, 9,055 feet (2,760 m) up the mountain. From there they had only another 10,495 feet (3,199 m) to go, Schmidt told me, slogging steeply uphill the hard way. It was the only “relatively safe” option.
For thirty days starting in early May they skied and climbed and packed loads of food, tents, sleeping bags, clothing, climbing gear, and heavy cases of the new high-tech survey equipment—satellite receivers, antennas, and heavy batteries—steadily upward through spectacular spring sunshine and howling late-winter snowstorms that nearly forced them back. Being so close to the Gulf of Alaska meant that nasty weather could blast across the slopes with almost no warning. And it did, several times.
By Schmidt’s account, though, the expedition was a complete success. They nailed a new brass survey marker at 18,044 feet (5,500 m), on the edge of the Logan plateau; when they finally reached the summit, the portable GPS system worked perfectly and the official height of the mountain was confirmed at 19,550 feet (5,959 m). But they also proved under extremely harsh field conditions that this new, extremely precise technology could be used to help figure out what was really happening along Cascadia’s fault.
Measuring mountains and the drift of continents using satellites, sophisticated antennas, and software to track the warping and bending and horizontal migration of land caused by plate tectonics would become the focus of Mike Schmidt’s working life. At the Pacific Geoscience Centre on southern Vancouver Island, he helped develop the technology and methodology for tracking the minute and ongoing deformation of the earth’s crust. But before GPS, there were lasers and Geodolites and each step along the way was a huge improvement.
I heard the story of how it all began from Schmidt’s senior colleague, Herb Dragert, who was there at PGC when the study of migrating mountains began in 1976. Apparently a burning desire to prove that Tuzo Wilson at the University of Toronto was right all along about plate tectonics had been Dragert’s personal motivation. As an eager young student, his imagination had been fired by Wilson and those big ideas about drifting continents. “He kind of said to us, ‘Okay—we do get plate convergence on the west coast and we should be able to measure the actual motions of the earth’s surface,’” Dragert recalled with gusto. “These mountains should be squeezed!” Which is precisely what he, Schmidt, and a team of others from the Geological Survey would try to confirm.
On Vancouver Island the idea was to locate the original stone cairns and brass markers on mountain tops that had been surveyed back in the late 1930s to remeasure the distances and the angles between the peaks and thus find out whether—or indeed, how much—they had moved by the late ’70s. Decades later I wanted to see how the work had been done. In 2007 I needed a way to illustrate the process for a television documentary, so Schmidt was going to show me by doing it again.
Thus I found myself in a helicopter once more, flying this time toward the lumpy shoulder of Mount Landalt, a few miles north of Lake Cowichan on southern Vancouver Island. The skids of the JetRanger touched down gently on a bed of gray lichens and green moss sprinkled with tiny, bright fuchsia-colored flowers. Schmidt pulled out the first of two steel cases, each a little larger than your standard, full-size suitcase. Then he carried a set of heavy-duty tripod legs to the summit and set them up directly above the control point, the brass marker that had been established by the original survey crew back in 1937.