Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [77]
The latest seismic data showed all the normal little tremors in the overlying crust and in the down-going plate, but along the subduction interface itself—that eight-hundred-mile (1,300 km) scraping edge where the two plates actually meet deep underground—there was “a distinct absence” of even low-level seismic activity. The same kind of ominous silence that had been noticed before the quake near Adak Island three years earlier.
Herb Dragert’s evidence that the subduction zone was locked and loading the kind of strain energy that could only be released in a big shock—the proof that his mentor, Tuzo Wilson, was right about tectonic plates squeezing Vancouver Island against the mainland—was now a matter of public record. The implication was, he wrote, that “a definite potential exists for a future megathrust earthquake.”
He and colleague Garry Rogers had also decided that a version of Cascadia’s emerging story needed to reach a wider public, so they wrote a short, provocative article entitled, “Could a Megathrust Earthquake Strike Southwestern British Columbia?” which was published in a quarterly government magazine called Geos. Hoping, perhaps, that the headline might capture the attention of editors and journalists in the mainstream media, they borrowed the language of a crime novel, talking of “smoking guns” and “lethal weapons.”
Piece by piece they laid out the clues unearthed by scientists on both sides of the border. In answering their own provocative questions, they did their best to remain scrupulously neutral while leading readers to the obvious conclusion: “We see no evidence to preclude the occurrence of a megathrust earthquake ... Geological evidence suggests that large earthquakes may have occurred.” On one point, however, they did not equivocate; they stated flatly that “crustal deformation is currently taking place.”
As for predicting the next rupture, they wrote, “Unfortunately, our present data are too sparse to provide information on the likely timing of such an earthquake in this region.” In the closing paragraphs they got serious about the significance of their mystery tale. The consequences of a great subduction jolt and the tsunami it generated would be devastating because so many communities would be affected at the same time. “If such an earthquake occurred, it would likely be the largest economic and social catastrophe due to nature ever to affect Canada,” Dragert and Rogers wrote. They carefully noted that much of the evidence was still circumstantial. “As with the pursuit of the smoking gun in the mystery novel, we still need more evidence to prove that the gun has fired or is likely to fire again. But our suspicions are mounting.”
The Geos article did have the desired effect. It was picked up and rewritten by several newspapers in Canada, making Dragert and Rogers briefly famous as young, intrepid scientific sleuths. Their moment in the limelight was no doubt less painful than the cluster-attack on Gary Carver by reporters at the convention in Phoenix, though the message was essentially the same.
On October 17, 1989, I was back in Toronto, jetlagged from Europe and completely immersed in interview transcripts, trying to write a script for a documentary on Poland’s new Solidarity government. I had a quick dinner and went to bed early, feeling exhausted. I had just drifted off to sleep when the phone beside the bed rang loudly and jolted me into a semi-conscious stupor. It was Sally Reardon, one of the senior producers on the desk at The Journal, the CBC