Goodbye California - Alistair [2]
The extent of the dislocation along this right-slip fault – so called because if you stand on either side of the fault after an earthquake the other side appears to have moved to the right – is crucial in relation to the magnitude of the shock. Occasionally there may be no lateral slip at all. Sometimes it may be only a foot or two. But, even though its consequences are not to be contemplated lightly, a lateral slip of forty feet is eminently possible.
In fact, and in this context, all things are possible. The active earthquake and volcanic belt that circumgirdles the Pacific is commonly – and appropriately – known as the ‘ring of fire’. The San Andreas Fault is an integral part of this, and it is on this ring of fire that the two greatest monster earthquakes (in Japan and South America) ever recorded have occurred. They were on the order of eight-point-nine on the Richter scale. California can lay no more claim to divine protection than any other part of the ring of fire and there is no compelling reason why the next monster, about six times as powerful as the great San Francisco one, shouldn’t occur, say, in San Bernardino, thus effectively dumping Los Angeles into the Pacific. And the Richter scale goes up to twelve!
Earthquakes on the ring of fire can show another disadvantageous aspect – they can occur offshore as well as under land. When this occurs huge tidal waves result. In 1976 the town of Mindanao in the Southern Philippines was inundated and all but destroyed and thousands of lives were lost when an undersea earthquake at the mouth of the crescent-shaped Morro Bay caused a fifteen-foot tidal wave that engulfed the shores of the bay. Such an ocean earthquake off San Francisco would devastate the Bay area and, in all probability, wouldn’t do any good to the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys.
As it is said, it is the wandering nature of those tectonic plates that is the prime cause of earthquakes. But there are three other imponderable possibilities that could well act as triggering factors which could conceivably cause earthquakes.
The first of those is emissions from the sun. It is known that the strength and content of solar winds alter considerably and wholly unpredictably. It is also known that they can produce considerable alterations in the chemical structure of our atmosphere which in turn can have the effect of either accelerating or acting as a brake on the rotation of the earth; an effect which, because it would be measurable in terms of only hundredths of a second, would be wholly undetected by many but could have (and may have had in the past) an influence ranging from the considerable to the profound on the unanchored tectonic plates.
Secondly, there is a respectable body of scientific opinion that holds that the gravitational influences of the planets act on the sun to modulate the strength of these solar winds. This is of immediate concern since a rare alignment of all the planets of the Solar System is due in 1982. If this theory, known as The Jupiter Effect from the title of a book by Drs John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, is correct that alignment will be the trigger for unprecedented solar activity, with repercussions on the stability of planet Earth. So scientists are waiting for 1982 with considerable interest, and not a little trepidation.
And, apart from war, this concept can be employed for a variety of other interesting purposes, which is what this book is about.
CHAPTER ONE
Ryder opened his tired eyelids and reached for the telephone without enthusiasm. ‘Yes?’
‘Lieutenant Mahler. Get down here right away. And bring your son.’
‘What’s wrong?’ The lieutenant customarily made a point of having his subordinates call him ‘sir’, but in Sergeant Ryder’s case he’d given up years ago. Ryder reserved that term for