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WORK TITLE: The Great Quake
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WEBSITE: https://www.henry-fountain.com/
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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/306988/henry-fountain * https://www.linkedin.com/in/henry-fountain-44b9416/
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LC control no.: n 2001011801
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2001011801
HEADING: Fountain, Henry
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PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Yale University, 1976.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Science journalist and editor. New York Times, New York, NY, reporter and columnist, former deputy editor of “Circuits” technology section. Has worked for numerous periodicals, including the International Herald Tribune in Paris, Connecticut’s Bridgeport Post, and New York Newsday.
WRITINGS
Author of the weekly “Observatory” column for New York Times, 1999-2009.
SIDELIGHTS
Henry Fountain is a science journalist and editor. He began working with the New York Times in the late 1990s, serving as the deputy editor for the “Circuits” technology column and longtime author of the “Observatory” weekly column. Fountain has also worked for other periodicals, including the International Herald Tribune in Paris, Connecticut’s Bridgeport Post, and New York Newsday.
The New York Times Circuits
Fountain published his first book, The New York Times Circuits: How Electronic Things Work, in 2001. The account looks at the “Circuits” technology column from the New York Times to highlight the history of electrical advancements since the 1990s. Fountain opens by discussing basic components of modern electronic equipment, such as the chip, the laser, and the bar code, before moving on to their applications. Fountain discusses electronic fences for pets, the virtual first-down line on television football broadcasts, and musical greeting cards. The devices range from the obscure—such as ion propulsion—to the mundane, like supermarket scanners and television remote controls.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews pointed out that “the range of subjects is almost as broad as the electronic revolution itself.” The critic noted that the introduction “neatly” explains human progress since Edison’s incandescent light bulb. The same reviewer labeled the account “a clear, readable, fascinating overview of the tools and gadgets of the modern world.”
The Great Quake
In 2017 Fountain published The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet. The account examines the infamous Alaskan earthquake of 1964, which was one of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded. At a magnitude of 9.2, the earthquake caused massive damage and 130 deaths in the sparsely populated region. Aside from the human element to the disaster, Fountain also chronicles U.S. Geological Survey geologist George Plafker and the way his research from this quake led to advances in the theory of plate tectonics.
In an interview with Dave Davies of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, Fountain explained just how powerful this earthquake actually was. He exclaimed: “It was a heck of an earthquake. It was the second-most powerful ever recorded, you know, in recorded history – or since they’ve been recording earthquakes with instruments. It was originally thought to be about the same power as the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. But in retrospect – or shortly thereafter, it was determined it was much, much more powerful.”
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews claimed that Fountain “succeeds in showing why this particular earthquake and its aftermath are worth remembering.” The same Kirkus Reviews reviewer called The Great Quake “a readable book that shows how natural disaster spurred scientific inquiry.” A Publishers Weekly contributor claimed that “readers Readers interested in the human toll of Alaska’s Good Friday Quake will appreciate the story.” Writing in the Daily News-Miner, David James mentioned that “the scientific side of this story is told in greater detail in Jerry Thompson’s 2011 book Cascadia’s Fault.” Jame concluded that “Fountain’s volume is more narrowly focused on one event and its ramifications and tells the Alaska part of the story more thoroughly than any currently available work. Even most state residents are likely unaware of the role our earthquake played in reshaping geology. It was tectonic on more than one level.”Reviewing the book in the San Francisco Chronicle, Mary Ellen Hannibal remarked that “Fountain memorably evokes an era in which impoverished students happily crowded around their Svengali to hear tall geological tales while consuming beer, beans and bread at the Clam Broth House on Newark Avenue in Hoboken, N.J.” Hannibal exclaimed that “the Alaska quake is impressive in and of itself. The way it deployed also shed new light on how we understand both earthquakes and the whole tectonic framework in which they occur.” Hannibal found The Great Quake to be “entertaining and enlightening.”
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Stephen Phillips recorded that “Fountain isn’t a showy writer, but there’s a fever-dream quality to his account of those five minutes that ‘made the earth ring like a bell’ that captures the hallucinogenic oddness of a world off-kilter, out-of-joint, suddenly uncooperative. Combinations of words with no earthly business being together occur.” Phillips stated: “Interleaving snapshots of a lost world, the primal power of nature and high science, The Great Quake is an outstanding work of nonfiction. It’s also a reminder that the original agent of creative destruction resides not in the corporate boardroom, ivory tower or artist’s salon but beneath our feet.” In reviewing the book alongside Kathryn Miles’s Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake, Richard J. Murnane said in a review in Science that “these books are both accessible accounts that complement one another. Readers interested in the history of plate tectonics, seismic risk, and our society’s vulnerability would likely enjoy them both.” Writing in the Free Lance-Star, Jeff Schulze reasoned that “the book appeals equally to the brain and the heart. Fountain balances the recount of the cold, intellectual work pursued by Plafker with emotional, heart-wrenching tales of Alaskans’ desperate efforts to evade tsunamis, landslides and crevices.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Daily News-Miner, November 19, 2017, David James, review of The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet.
Free Lance-Star, September 30, 2017, Jeff Schulze, review of The Great Quake.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2001, review of The New York Times Circuits: How Electronic Things Work, p. 1187; June 15, 2017, review of The Great Quake.
Los Angeles Times, August 4, 2017, Stephen Phillips, review of The Great Quake.
Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2017, review of The Great Quake, p. 44.
San Francisco Chronicle, August 11, 2017, Mary Ellen Hannibal, review of The Great Quake.
ONLINE
Failure, http://failuremag.com/ (October 28, 2017), Jason Zasky, “The Great Alaska Earthquake.”
Fresh Air, https://www.npr.org/ (July 26, 2017), Dave Davies, “Looking Back at the Most Powerful Earthquake Ever to Strike North America.”
Henry Fountain Website, https://www.henry-fountain.com (April 8, 2018).
Science, http://blogs.sciencemag.org/ (August 8, 2017), Richard J. Murnane, review of The Great Quake.
About me
I'm a longtime New York Times editor and reporter who has written about science for two decades. Currently I am one of a team of journalists at the Times covering climate change and its impacts. But I've written about many other subjects throughout my career, including: lab-grown meat, roller coaster design, the physics of football, the flaws of forensic science, tissue engineering, skyscraper demolition, the expansion of the Panama Canal, the mechanics of El Niño, mudslides, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes and other natural and human-caused disasters, including the 2010 Gulf oil spill and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdowns.
To read my latest stories at the Times, click here.
I first heard about the 1964 Alaska earthquake in college, when a friend played me an audio tape made by someone in Anchorage while the quake was occurring. I became interested in writing a book about it around the time of its 50th anniversary in 2014, when I wrote an article in the Times's science section about the quake's impact on science. You can read the article here.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HENRY FOUNTAIN has been a reporter and editor at the New York Times for two decades, writing about science for most of that time. From 1999 to 2009 he wrote “Observatory,” a weekly column in the Science Times section. He was an editor on the national news desk and the Sunday Review and was one of the first editors of Circuits, the Times‘ pioneering technology section. Prior to coming to the Times, Fountain worked at the International Herald Tribune in Paris, New York Newsday, and the Bridgeport Post in Connecticut. He is a graduate of Yale University, where he majored in architecture. He and his family live just outside of New York City. Learn more at henry-fountain.com.
About the Author
Henry Fountain is the deputy editor of Circuits, The New York Times's weekly section on personal technology. He also writes "Observatory," a column of science news for the paper's Science Times section.
SCIENCE
Looking Back At The Most Powerful Earthquake Ever To Strike North America
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July 26, 20171:45 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air
Fresh Air
Science writer Henry Fountain says the deadly quake that shook Alaska in 1964 was so loud some thought it was the beginning of World War III. His new book is The Great Quake.
The Great Quake
How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet
by Henry Fountain
Hardcover, 304 pages purchase
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. On a Friday afternoon in 1964, the mayor of Anchorage, Alaska, noticed something peculiar. A raven was trying to land on a light pole that was swaying so violently that the bird couldn't take hold. It was the beginning of the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America. It altered the landscape of some parts of the state and killed 131 people, some as far away as California, as the quake generated deadly tidal waves.
Our guest, New York Times science writer Henry Fountain, has a new book about the dramatic and deadly impact of the quake and about a geologist whose investigation of its causes deepened our understanding of movements below the Earth's surface. Henry Fountain has been reporter and editor at the Times for two decades. His writing now focuses on climate change.
He spoke to FRESH AIR's Dave Davies about his book "The Great Quake: How The Biggest Earthquake In North America Changed Our Understanding Of The Planet." It will be published next month.
DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Well, Henry Fountain, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Why don't we begin by just getting a sense of the scale of this disaster? How did the power of this earthquake compare, say, to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 or the one that damaged that nuclear reactor in Japan in 2011?
HENRY FOUNTAIN: Sure. Well, it was a heck of an earthquake. It was the second-most powerful ever recorded, you know, in recorded history - or since they've been recording earthquakes with instruments. It was originally thought to be about the same power as the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. But in retrospect - or shortly thereafter, it was determined it was much, much more powerful.
You know, a rough indication is how long the ground shakes for. And in the San Francisco earthquake, there was a foreshock at first that shook for about 20 seconds. And then the main shocks shook for something like 40 or 45 seconds. So that's about a minute. In Alaska, the ground shook for about 4.5 minutes, which is a really, really long time.
As compared to the Japanese earthquake, the Tohoku earthquake of 2011, the one that killed, I think, about 17,000 people and - you know, it led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster - that one was slightly less powerful.
DAVIES: This quake came late on a Friday afternoon. Right? March 27 - technically spring but plenty of snow still around. And in the book, we experience the quake through the eyes of some people who lived through it. One of them is a woman named Christine Madson. Tell us who she was, where she was.
FOUNTAIN: Chris Madson was a schoolteacher in a little native village by the name of Chenega on an island of the same name in Prince William Sound. She was from Long Beach, Calif. And she'd graduated from college in California and then decided she wanted to see the world. And she'd got a job working in a one-room schoolhouse in Chenega. Chenega has about 70 people, and she lived in an apartment right next door.
DAVIES: When the quake strikes, it's Friday afternoon, and she happens to be up at the top of the hill of this village, where the schoolhouse is. What does she see? What does she experience?
FOUNTAIN: Well, you know, she sees something that - like everybody who experienced this earthquake, she sees something that she never could get out of her mind. She never forgot about it. She turned around. She felt the ground shaking. You know, like everybody else, she saw trees whipping back and forth, almost like windshield wipers. She turned around and looked out over the water.
So Chenega was on a little cove, a little bay. And it seemed like a vacuum cleaner had come along and sucked all the water out of the little cove. And so she looked back, and there was, in place of rippling water, there was just seafloor. She couldn't figure out what was going on. She was absolutely stunned by it.
DAVIES: Right. And you describe a number of people. I mean, the Earth heaving like this is an unreal experience. And you mentioned that when she was watching these spruce trees swaying, they weren't swaying from the top.
FOUNTAIN: No. It was like a metronome or a windshield wiper. They were literally sort of flapping back-and-forth. A lot of people recall that the actual - the top branches of the trees would actually touch the ground, it swayed so much. The reason they saw that is because the ground was rippling like a body of water, like waves rolling through a body of water, except this was waves rolling through Earth.
And so you'd have crests and troughs. And when a wave rolled through and a crest rolled through and there was a tree there, it would, you know, it would bend either way, depending as it approached the crest or after the crest. So you know, it was surreal for everybody who saw it.
DAVIES: What one measure of the power of this event was - you described there's a mountain near Sherman Glacier. What happened there?
FOUNTAIN: Yeah, it was renamed afterwards, Shattered Peak, because the peak of the mountain literally shattered in the quake. There was so much rolling and rollicking of the land. And the top, I think, roughly several thousand feet of this peak broke off, started sliding down the mountain. It turned into this gigantic debris slide, rock slide. It had a sort of cushion of air under it, so the friction was minimal. So it reached speeds estimated afterwards to be greater than 200 miles an hour - huge volume, you know, millions of cubic yards of debris coming down this mountainside.
At the bottom of the mountain was Sherman Glacier, one of many glaciers in this part of Alaska. This is the Chugach range. And it hit the glacier. It spread out over it for a distance of a couple of miles and a couple of miles wide and about 4 feet thick. And basically just - it covered the glacier like frosting on a cake. And it's still there. You can still see it.
DAVIES: Fifty years later.
FOUNTAIN: Fifty years later, yeah.
DAVIES: Wow. So this teacher, Chris Madson, is at the top of this hill where this little village of Chenega is on this island, and the earth shakes. She sees the cove = that's the body of water there - literally empty. But then, the wave comes. What does she see?
FOUNTAIN: Yeah, then she sees - just a few minutes later, actually - the ground is still shaking at this point. I said before the ground shook for 4 or 4.5, 5 minutes, depending on whose memories you're talking about. But about 3 minutes into this shaking, after the cove is emptied of water, all of a sudden, a big wave of water comes into the cove, and it swamps the village.
It swamps the people who are down - the unfortunate people who are down in the village. There were some kids playing on the beach because it was low tide to begin with. There was - a lot of kids were down there chasing after birds, doing stuff kids do after school. And then the adults in the village were just doing normal things - making dinner, visiting with friends.
One woman was thinking of taking a bath - you know, all sorts of stuff - plain, ordinary stuff. And all of a sudden, they're confronted with this wall of water, a tidal wave, which is what they referred to it at the time. You know, obviously, these days, we call them tsunamis. But either way, it was, you know, a horrific wall of water that swamped the village and all the little homes, as well.
DAVIES: And what did it do to the village and the people?
FOUNTAIN: Well, it and another one that came later both destroyed every house except for one, swept people away. The people, you know, who could, ran up the hill to the schoolhouse because that was the highest terrain in the village. So generally, the most able-bodied people, the sort of the younger adults, were able to scramble up the hill in time to survive.
But a lot of the kids didn't survive. And a lot of the older people in the village were swept away as well. But most of the people were never found again. Most of the bodies were never found again. In all, I think 23 people in the village died. So 23 out of about 70 lost their lives.
DAVIES: We're speaking with Henry Fountain. His new book is "The Great Quake: How The Biggest Earthquake In North America Changed Our Understanding Of The Planet." We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOACIR SANTOS' "EXCERPT NO. 1")
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Henry Fountain. He covers climate change for The New York Times. He has a new book about the 1964 earthquake in Alaska, the largest quake ever recorded in North America. It's called "The Great Quake."
One of the places that took it the worst in this disaster was Valdez, a name people know because of the Exxon Valdez disaster years later. It was a town at the end of a fjord. Just describe the town at the time.
FOUNTAIN: Sure. It was basically the end of a line. There was a road from Anchorage that ended in Valdez. And in the '60s, it was sort of on a downward cycle. There wasn't much mining anymore. The war kind of wiped that out. There was fishing, but there wasn't that much else. There was about maybe 1,500, 2,000 people living there at that time and they all lived in the little community, which was right on the water's edge.
It was built on sediments that had been washed down from a glacier a couple of miles away. You know, there was a lot of sort of flooding from time to time from these steams and stuff. But generally, it was a fun place to live. There was obviously great scenery nearby. It was spectacular mountains and glaciers and lots of hunting and fishing.
DAVIES: It was a town with no radio station, you said, and no TV service. And...
FOUNTAIN: No.
DAVIES: And one of the things that people did for entertainment was when a ship would come in. And as it happened, the Friday that the quake struck, a ship had just come into harbor. How did that affect this?
FOUNTAIN: Yeah, a ship had just come in and, you know, when you say entertainment was when a ship came in, the ship that provided by far the most entertainment was a cargo ship that would come regularly to deliver everything because although there was a road to Valdez, most everything was brought in by ship.
And because nothing much happened in Valdez, when a ship like that came in, two things - one is a lot of the able-bodied adult men, to supplement their income, would work as stevedores or longshoremen down at the docks helping to unload the ship. And number two - because it was kind of exciting because this was in the days before containers. You'd have bulk cargo being hauled off the ship, so people could stand there and watch and, oh, there comes, you know, those car parts I ordered or, you know, here's the food I was looking for.
Just, you know, just curious things, watching people do their work.
DAVIES: So you have this waterfront community where half the town is on the waterfront and a huge vessel is there when this massive earthquake strikes. What happens?
FOUNTAIN: Yeah, well, so as I said, Valdez was built on these sediments that were washed down from the glacier, hundreds and hundreds of feet of sediments, which were fine to build buildings on and to have a dock built on, you know, the pilings sunk into the sediments. But when they get shaken, they act like almost like jelly or like water. They turn to water.
The process is known as liquefaction. And so when the earthquake happened and the ground started shaking, the waterfront essentially collapsed into the water. This was a very deep Harbor. It's a fjord, remember. So something like 4,000 feet of the waterfront going back a couple hundred feet just turned to jelly and collapsed. And it took the dock with it. And there were about 25 people on the dock, and they all went with the dock as it disappeared.
They all disappeared literally in a few seconds and were never seen again. The ship itself nearly got, you know, taken down with the dock. It was actually moored to the dock. The ship managed to get free but had to sort of ride this rising sort of bubbling cauldron of water. As the dock and all the sediment slumped, it displaced a lot of water in the harbor.
And that water came up like a rising, you know, mound of water and raised the ship and turned it on a very cockeyed angle so that the stern was sort of sticking way up in the air. And people in the town actually saw the propeller of the ship from their homes. And the ship, you know, managed to somehow survive. When the water started sort of coming out of the town, managed to get free enough and by then, it had righted itself.
And it was able to sort of slowly turn away, miraculously with no real permanent damage to the hull or to the propeller or the propulsion system. But it was a very wild ride for about 10 or 15 minutes.
DAVIES: This is a story about a dramatic event. It's also a story about science and a great leap in our understanding of earthquakes and other things about how the earth moves and changes. The guy at the heart of this story is a geologist named George Plafker. Was he an earthquake expert?
FOUNTAIN: No, far from it. George Plafker was a U.S. Geological Survey geologist. At the time, he had a, you know, Bachelor of Science in geology. He didn't really know anything about earthquakes. What he did know is he knew Alaska. He worked for the Alaska branch of the Geological Survey. And so he would basically go out, he and a partner would get dropped off in a bush plane somewhere and they'd go around and they'd look for rock outcroppings and note the rocks, read the rocks, essentially, with, you know, the rock hammer and a compass and a hand level.
And the goal was simply, as a lot of the Geological Survey's work was, was to figure out what mineral resources there were in Alaska. This was, again, this was a young state. So at the time of the quake, March 27, 1964, the Geological Survey decided immediately, you know, we have to find out what happened with this quake. I mean, this is, like, huge.
Even - you know, they didn't know the specifics. But they knew this was an enormous earthquake. But they didn't really have any seismologists on staff. What they did have was they had George and a couple of other Alaska branch people who were comfortable and quite able to get around Alaska, knew people, knew how to survive in the country.
They weren't afraid of bears. They could be out on their own for a week or two without any kind of worry. So they sent George and two other geologists, Arthur Grantz and Reuben Kachadoorian, to Anchorage the day after the quake.
DAVIES: This is also a story about the science of earthquakes and our understanding of what was happening. And I wonder if you could just sort of summarize what the scientific thinking was in the 1960s about what kind of movements there were in the earth that caused earthquakes and other phenomena. What was the debate?
FOUNTAIN: Well, there were two basic ways of thinking about this - how the structure of the Earth moved or didn't move. There were people who believed in this idea of what was then called plate tectonics, of - that there was magma coming out of ridges in the Earth under the oceans and forming new ocean floor and sort of spreading out and reaching the continents tens of millions of years later - this all happened very slowly - and then sort of disappearing under the continents and causing earthquakes.
These people were known as the mobilists (ph) because they believed that the continents moved and the ocean floors moved. There were a lot of very prominent scientists who, for one reason or another, found this hard to believe. They were generally known as the stablists (ph). They thought the continents were where they'd been always, that they didn't move.
They might have believed that ocean floor was created. But they thought that what was happening is the Earth itself was getting slightly bigger as this oceanic crust was created. So there were really two schools of thought in the mid-'60s. And it was a big, big debate. It's hard to believe now because plate tectonics is pretty much universally accepted. But 1964, a lot of very, very smart people didn't believe it.
DAVIES: So George Plafker goes to Alaska where he knows the terrain and just spends a lot of time gathering observations. What does he do? What does it tell him?
FOUNTAIN: So he spent the summer surveying the Sound. The work that he did, the surveying work, was based on - largely on the habits of a particular marine creature, a barnacle, that happens to settle on rocks at a certain position relating to the tide. And so they used what they referred to as the barnacle line to determine whether the land had risen up or had sunk down.
And if you think about it, so if these barnacles settle in an area that's, say, about a foot below the high tide, and they settle there because they're under water some of the time, which is how they feed, and yet they're not under water all of the time, which would subject them to predation more. You know, they'd get eaten more.
So they settle in pretty much, you know, if you see this line of barnacles, you know, OK, the high tide is a foot above there. And based on the position of the barnacles after the quake, he could determine whether the land rose up or fell down. He and several others spent a couple of months basically surveying the entire coastline and determined, as I mentioned before, that a huge area of Prince William Sound actually rose up during the quake.
And it rose anything from, you know, a couple of feet to 35 feet or more. And then other parts towards Anchorage subsided during the quake. That, to him, was some kind of major indicator of the mechanism of this earthquake.
DAVIES: Right. You know, and I'll just note to the audience, the descriptions of the science here are really interesting in the book. And in the end, he writes a paper, which kind of puts him up against geophysicists who have a lot more, you know, heavyweight reputations in this area. He turns out to be right. And it's now acknowledged that his understanding of this earthquake really got at what happened.
What was it that he - that came out of this that gives us an ongoing understanding of what causes these things?
FOUNTAIN: So George, he basically figured out that - the way I like to put it is the only way you could understand how this earthquake happened is if you accept the idea of plate tectonics, if you accept the idea that at these margins, as I was - continental margins, as I was talking about, that the oceanic crust slides down underneath the continental crust, subducts is the term.
So his paper, which was published in 1965 in the journal Science, very calmly kind of put forth his reasoning and just as calmly, kind of destroyed the reasoning of the other people. And it was accepted. And generally, it took a while for the scientific community to really understand what he'd written. But it was, you know, it didn't - like, it wasn't the eureka moment that led to plate tectonics being a universally accepted theory, which it is today.
But it was part of the confirmation process of plate tectonics. The only way you could understand this earthquake is to accept the idea that, you know, the Earth's structure, the top parts of the earth are - consist of these plates that move in relation to each other.
GROSS: We're listening to the interview FRESH AIR's Dave Davies recorded with New York Times science writer Henry Fountain about his new book "The Great Quake: How The Biggest Earthquake In North America Changed Our Understanding Of The Planet." They'll talk more about the quake and about covering climate change for The Times after we take a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRAD MEHLDAU'S "HIGHWAY RIDER")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview FRESH AIR's Dave Davies recorded with New York Times science writer Henry Fountain about his new book "The Great Quake: How The Biggest Earthquake In North America Changed Our Understanding Of The Planet." It's about the 1964 quake in Alaska that generated tidal waves and killed 131 people, some as far away as California.
It also changed our understanding of what causes earthquakes.
DAVIES: You know, one of the things that I wondered as people described their experiences of the earthquake itself was what it sounded like. What'd it sound like?
FOUNTAIN: Well, it's interesting. I, you know, I first learned about this earthquake in college when a friend of mine who collected old recordings - he was kind of an eccentric guy. He collected old recordings, and he played for me one day a recording of a person in Anchorage who just happened to have a tape recorder going when the quake hit. He might have been working at a radio station. I'm not sure. At any rate, it was amazing. It sounded like a freight train was barreling through his living room is the best I can describe it. And that's how it was described by a lot of the survivors that I talked to or the accounts of survivors that I read - huge booming sounds, you know, big, almost thunder, freight trains rumbling, deep rumbling.
And then there were a lot of booms that weren't necessarily related to the quake itself but the effects of the quake like landslides, avalanches, lakes breaking up. Everything was frozen at the time. So, you know, lakes would shake and kind of shatter into thick ice, you know, shatter into a lot of pieces.
There was a lot of booming. People - a lot of people thought, you know, Russia had dropped the big one - Soviet Union had dropped the big one. This was the start of World War III. There was a man in the woods in Cordova, which is on Prince William Sound, who was convinced that - he heard all these booms and he was convinced that the Russian navy had a battleship off the coast and was shelling Cordova.
So he hopped into his truck and got his gun and came into town ready to fight off the invaders. So it was loud.
DAVIES: Yeah. Your book is subtitled "How The Biggest Earthquake In North America Changed Our Understanding Of The Planet." So to get us to why this really matters, if we understand that the ocean floor is expanding and what that means is that at the margins, we have these plates that are applying pressure to other plates, maybe, that are part of the continental earth's crust, right?
FOUNTAIN: Yeah.
DAVIES: We've got pressure building in certain places. And it erupted with enormous force in Alaska. Where's the next big danger?
FOUNTAIN: Well, there's danger everywhere. But most people think that the biggest danger, certainly for North American - people living in North America, is off the northwest coast, off the coast of Washington and Oregon where there's a similar situation. There's a plate that's - oceanic plate that's subducting underneath the continent. And forces are building up and someday they'll break, which is what happens in an earthquake.
What makes people think that there's a, you know, a pretty strong likelihood of a major earthquake in that region sometime in the next 50 years or so is that the last one that they've understood happened, happened in 1700. And they've also, through techniques that George Plafker helped to pioneer, have determined that, you know, there have been a succession of major earthquakes in that area every 3-400 years or so.
So it means there are just - it's, like, 300 years ago was the last one. So they're due for another one. It could be very, you know, unlike Alaska of 1964, the Pacific Northwest has a lot of people, a lot of buildings, a lot of corporations, huge corporations. You know, it could be much, much more devastating to both the people and the economy if one were to strike.
DAVIES: So if a big earthquake's coming to the Pacific Northwest in the coming decades, let's say, is there anything we should be doing about it?
FOUNTAIN: Well, you know, the thing to do is to prepare and to - and some communities in the Pacific Northwest are preparing. They've built things like tsunami shelters, which are, you know, higher-elevation structures that are built to withstand shaking and that the townspeople can go to in the event of a tsunami warning. Usually, there's some warning of a tsunami.
I mean, it kind of depends. Obviously, the Chenegans had no warning. But usually there's some warning so there's some chance to flee. So people need to prepare, they need to know where to go in the event of an earthquake. You know, building codes have advanced tremendously. And a lot of Seattle, the buildings are built to withstand earthquakes, just as in other parts of the West and California, certainly.
But, you know, there's a lot of risks, a lot of, you know, it depends how strong it is, it depends on the time of day, depends whether it's high tide or low tide. There's all sorts of sort of unknowns. But the most important thing is to realize that - and I think most people in the Pacific Northwest do realize - they're living in a risky, hazardous area.
DAVIES: You've been writing about climate change for a long time. And you have a recent piece in The New York Times about the fact that melting Arctic Sea ice means there's more shipping in the area and in particular, a 1000-passenger luxury cruise ship that'll be going through the Northwest Passage next month. It'll be escorted by another ship. Explain this.
FOUNTAIN: Yeah, the cruise ship is not really designed to operate in polar waters. It's, you know, it was built to cruise the Mediterranean and stuff. And although they don't really expect to run into any ice or other problems, but if they do, they'd want to try to get out of the jam, however possible. The thrust of the story and the reason I wrote the story is because there's really no emergency search and rescue infrastructure in most of the Arctic.
And so that cruise company actually, I mean, the customers are paying a lot of money for it. But they're bringing along this other ship that'll contain emergency rations, a couple of helicopters, other gear to contain an oil spill or whatever and can actually - the other ship can actually maneuver through the ice pretty well so that if this cruise ship does get stuck or has some other problem, it'll have help right there.
And the problem is there's lots of other smaller cruise ships that are heading to the Arctic. There's some cargo ships that are operating in the Arctic now because there's less ice than there used to be. And the fear among people who know this is that it will - eventually, there will be some kind of incident, a grounding of a ship, even something like, you know, a medical emergency on a ship that involves, you know, a bunch of passengers eat a lot of bad food and get really violently sick or whatever.
And there'll be no way to immediately get people to safety because there's no - there's, you know, the U.S. has basically one icebreaker now. There's no - doing, like, a long-range rescue by helicopter would be really difficult and time consuming. So what they do is they rely on other ships in the area to come and help. There's not that many ships, really, in the area, relatively speaking So if there was a problem, you know, a ship, a cargo ship or cruise ship could be stuck for, you know, a couple of days or longer up in the High Arctic.
And that's why this particular cruise line decided to take its own help along.
DAVIES: Right. And if they were stuck in the High Arctic in, you know, for days, the danger would be the temperatures or drifting into ice or...
FOUNTAIN: It depends on the situation. But certainly, I mean, one of the ironies of climate change in the Arctic, you know, the Arctic is - one of the reasons I'm interested in the Arctic is that it's warming much faster than any other part of the planet. So you do have less sea ice. And you have - you know, it thins out quite a bit in the summertime, and it breaks up. And - but because there's less and it's sort of broken up, it tends to shift around a lot. And so you could have - you know, you could actually be perfectly fine one day as, say, a cruise ship sort of, you know, moored off an island in the Canadian arctic. And then the winds change, and all of a sudden you've got a lot of pack ice basically hemming you in. And you can't get out.
So it just - it kind of depends. There's other - there's - a lot of the Arctic is not particularly well-charted. And it wouldn't be out of the question for a ship to run aground up there. And once you run aground, who knows? A storm comes, you could break in two. You could founder. You could sink. You know, every ship carries some amount of fuel oil. And most cargo ships carry this very, very heavy fuel oil that's almost like sludge. And if that were to spill as a ship broke up, it would create an oil spill - not as bad as, say, the Exxon Valdez, but a significant oil spill that would be next to impossible to clean up.
DAVIES: You know, you've been writing about climate change for a long time. And this is an interesting time in the United States, to say the least. You know, President Trump has - wants to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. Where do you think we are now as a nation in dealing with this issue?
FOUNTAIN: Well, I think it could be a case, as has been happening with a lot of other issues, is where the public is sort of ahead of the political leadership in a lot of ways. The public - you know, if you look at surveys, you know, 70 percent of Americans think climate change is really happening and we need to do something about it. And so - whereas the federal government under the Trump administration has determined that it's not a problem, essentially. A lot of people, a lot of constituents, think it is.
And the people - the political leaders, that are closest to those constituents - the mayors, the governors, the local leaders - are more in tune with those constituents. And so immediately after Paris, you saw - after Trump decided to pull out of Paris, you saw a lot of governors, a lot of mayors announcing that they would hold - you know, they would do their best to keep the United States' pledge intact. And that's really because they're responding to what they see from the people that they lead in their communities.
DAVIES: And how much difference can you make at the state and local level when the federal government's going in a different direction?
FOUNTAIN: You actually can make quite a lot because, you know, in terms of what the federal government actually controls, in terms of what produces emissions - I mean, obviously things like fuel regulations, mileage standards for cars is a big deal. And, you know, the Clean Power Plan was a big deal. But there's lots of things that communities can do.
I talked to the mayor of Salt Lake City at the time who, you know, had just signed a contract with the local utility that all the power coming into Salt Lake City would be from renewable sources. So they have a lot of leverage. They can get a lot done. They're committed. They seem to be committed to getting a lot done because, as I said, most of the people that they lead, you know, the majority think, yeah, this is a real - this is a problem. And we got to do something about it.
DAVIES: Well, Henry Fountain, thanks so much for speaking with us again.
FOUNTAIN: Thanks for having me.
GROSS: Henry Fountain spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies, who is also WHYY's senior news reporter. Fountain is the author of the new book "The Great Quake: How The Biggest Earthquake In North America Changed Our Understanding Of The Planet." And he's a science writer for The New York Times. After we take a short break, Maureen Corrigan will review a new biography of Chester Himes, who wrote hard-boiled stories featuring black detectives. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF DANILO PEREZ AND CLAUS OGERMAN'S "RAYS AND SHADOWS")
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History Science & Technology
The Great Alaska Earthquake
In “The Great Quake,” Henry Fountain recounts the story of the 1964 Alaska Earthquake, and how it advanced our understanding of earthquake science.
Jason ZaskyOct 28, 2017
Fourth Ave In Anchorage After The Great Alaska Quake
Damage to Fourth Ave. in Anchorage, caused by the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964. Public domain.
On March 27, 1964—Good Friday—the most powerful earthquake in the history of North America struck the state of Alaska, with Whittier, Prince William Sound and Valdez forming a half-circle to the west, south and east of the epicenter. In Anchorage, seventy-five miles to the northwest, half of a downtown street (Fourth Avenue) dropped ten feet, which explains why the above U.S. Geological Survey photo is commonly used to illustrate the extent of the damage.
To this day, the so-called Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 (magnitude 9.2) remains the second most powerful in world history. Oddly, it is not particularly well remembered outside Alaska, as the death toll was modest for an earthquake of its size. On the other hand, it was a watershed event for earthquake science, as subsequent research into the mechanics of the quake helped confirm the theory of plate tectonics.
In the new book “The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet” (Crown), New York Times reporter Henry Fountain recounts the story of the 1964 Alaska Earthquake, and highlights the work of geologist George Plafker, who had no seismology training, yet managed to discern how this megathrust earthquake unfolded.
In the following Failure Interview, Fountain vividly describes the power of the Good Friday earthquake, reveals where damage to the land is still visible today, and how Plafker figured out what occurred.
The Alaska earthquake of 1964 still ranks as the second most powerful in history. Can you paint a picture of what it was like for those who lived through it?
Well, the biggest thing about it to my way of thinking has to be how strong it was and how long it lasted. With most earthquakes the shaking lasts for a few seconds or maybe half a minute or a minute. With this earthquake the ground shook for something like four-and-a-half minutes. That’s a really long time, and obviously the power of it was such that people saw things they’d never seen before, with the ground rippling in large waves, like the ocean. Or trees swaying so much that the tops of the trees actually slapped the ground as they shook back and forth. Not to mention incredible landslides and avalanches. People who happened to be on frozen lakes—with feet-thick ice—saw the ice shatter into pieces in front of them. There were lots of incredible sights that people had never seen before and never saw again.
I understand you’ve heard an audio recording that was made by someone in Alaska during the quake. What does one hear on the recording?
The most impressive thing about that recording is the sound. I listened to it while I was in college, and I didn’t know anything about the Alaska earthquake [at the time], but I remember thinking: Wow, it sounds like a freight train. It was that loud—that sort of deep, roaring rumbling noise of a close-by train. I think he was in a radio station in Anchorage and he was either on-air or recording something and he just kept the tape rolling and managed to maintain his composure. But you could tell it was frightening; it was frightening just listening to it.
Why isn’t the 1964 Alaska earthquake better remembered?
It’s largely because it occurred in Alaska and there weren’t that many people there. It was big news for a couple of days, but the death toll wasn’t very high. In the state it was around 113 people, which by the standards of a huge earthquake isn’t very many. After a couple of days most of the country and the world lost interest.
But if you talk to people in Alaska who were alive then or know people who were alive then, they have not forgotten it. And in the scientific community it hasn’t been forgotten because it was so big and because of the work that was done—by George Plafker and others—to figure it out.
Of the people killed, how did most die?
People who are afraid of earthquakes—and everyone has a right to be afraid of earthquakes—think the way they are going to get hurt or killed is by buildings falling on them or parts of buildings falling on them. That certainly happens, but in the Alaska quake ninety percent of the fatalities were caused by water—which they called tidal waves at the time and which are now known as tsunamis—which are caused by the displacement of a lot of sediment or land. In Alaska there was what you’d call a classic tsunami, which sends waves over the ocean and that killed some people on Kodiak Island and on the coast of California.
But there were a lot of local tsunamis, including the one that hit the native village of Chenega, where the first wave hit the village while the ground was still shaking. Nobody had any warning or any chance to escape.
Can one still see evidence of the quake in Alaska today, and if so, where?
Yes, if you know where to look. In certain neighborhoods—like downtown Anchorage—you can see where they have built buttresses. A lot of Anchorage is built on a layer of clay and with all of the shaking it acted almost like grease and the soil above it slid. So in Anchorage there was a big slide that went down a hill toward a creek and it caused one side of one of the downtown streets to drop ten feet below the other. In the iconic photos you see, there is a theater marquee that is at ground level instead of ten feet above the sidewalk.
Also, out by [Ted Stevens] Anchorage International Airport there is a place called Earthquake Park, which is an area where there was a lot of sliding in a residential neighborhood. The earth above the sliding claylike layer was frozen and broke apart in these giant chunks that rotated and took houses with them. They didn’t rebuild in part of that area and you can walk through this park where the land is still totally tortured. You can still see signs of landslides in certain places, too. Valdez was badly hit and had to be abandoned. You can see where they had to build the new town four miles away. If you go to the old town site you can see how it sunk during the quake and at high tide it gets flooded.
One of the key protagonists in your book is George Plafker. What role does he play in the story?
Plafker is still around, although he is now retired. He was a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) geologist who worked for the Alaska branch, so in the summertime he spent his days in the backcountry of Alaska, surveying the countryside to try to figure out what kind of mineral resources Alaska had. Then he would go back to branch headquarters in Menlo Park, California, and do mapping. So he knew how to get around Alaska and wasn’t afraid of being in the backcountry by himself.
When the quake happened the USGS—who had no seismologists on staff—sent him and a couple other field geologists up there to do the work. Plafker really took to it. He spent a couple weeks investigating all the different changes to the land and then he went back that summer with the idea of measuring all the changes—all the uplift and subsidence—that occurred during the quake.
He did that primarily around Prince William Sound by measuring the elevation changes of barnacles on rocks. Barnacles like to settle at a certain point in relation to the high tide, so if the land rises or settles down you can get a pretty solid idea of how much the land moved.
He was a very intuitive guy with no seismology training, but he was able to pretty much figure out the mechanism of this quake—which we now call a megathrust earthquake—which no one really recognized before. A lot of megathrust earthquakes occur where one of the tectonic plates is sliding (or subducting) beneath another one. In the case of Alaska it’s the Pacific Plate that is sliding beneath the North American one.
Plafker figured out, pretty much on his own, that this earthquake had to be an example of something occurring at that zone where one plate is sliding under the other. It was pretty revolutionary and basically helped confirm the theory of plate tectonics, which in the mid-1960s was still a big debate among scientists as to whether it was valid or not.
What is the outlook for another big quake occurring in Alaska in the coming years or decades?
Alaska has a lot of earthquakes; it’s a seismically active zone. Plafker has actually done a lot of work to try to figure out how often these big earthquakes occur in Alaska. They don’t occur that frequently—every 400 to 600 years. So in terms of a big megathrust quake—which would kill a lot more people today because there are many more people living there—Alaskans are generally safe. But all that subduction and movement of the two crusts creates all kinds of other faults and they still definitely get strong [magnitude 8] quakes there. So there are bound to be more earthquakes in the near future and some of them will be destructive. People who live in Alaska realize this and know they need to be prepared.
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Print Marked Items
Fountain, Henry: THE GREAT QUAKE
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Fountain, Henry THE GREAT QUAKE Crown (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 8, 8 ISBN: 978-1-101-90406-0
A veteran science journalist illuminates the significance of the biggest earthquake ever recorded in North
America.In his first book, New York Times reporter and editor Fountain combines scientific expertise and
human interest storytelling to detail the devastation wreaked by the massive 1964 earthquake and explain
why it hasn't gotten more attention and has been all but forgotten less than 60 years later. As the author
makes clear, the quake, which took place on Good Friday, March 27, was truly a horrific disaster to
experience: its magnitude was 9.2, and it lasted "the better part of five minutes, which is an eternity for an
earthquake." Furthermore, "the energy released was equivalent to thousands of A-bombs," and it opened
cracks that were 6 feet wide, 4 feet deep, and a quarter-mile long. Yet because the region most severely
affected was underpopulated, it never achieved the notoriety of smaller California quakes through the
decades. The human cost was some 130 casualties, many from the giant waves that engulfed small coastal
villages. Fountain relates much of the narrative through the perspective of George Plafker, "a geologist with
the US Geological Survey" who, at 35, "was already something of an old Alaska hand." Plafker arrived in
the wake of the earthquake and used what he learned to advance the theory of plate tectonics, which is "now
considered as consequential as Darwin's theory of evolution (although plate tectonics was the work of many
people not one man)." The author provides a narrative counterpoint through the perspective of a young
female teacher who saw the village surrounding her one-room schoolhouse destroyed. Though Fountain
never achieves the novelistic drama of Jon Krakauer or Sebastian Junger in their bestselling man-againstnature
books, he succeeds in showing why this particular earthquake and its aftermath are worth
remembering. A readable book that shows how natural disaster spurred scientific inquiry.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Fountain, Henry: THE GREAT QUAKE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495427523/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bf5a8c26.
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The Great Quake: How the Biggest
Earthquake in North America Changed
Our Understanding of the Planet
Publishers Weekly.
264.23 (June 5, 2017): p44.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet
Henry Fountain. Crown, $28, (304p) ISBN 9781-101-90406-0
Fountain, a veteran New York Times reporter and editor, adopts a human-interest perspective as he reports
on the lives affected by the infamous Alaskan earthquake of Mar. 27, 1964. He begins by introducing
George Plafker and his colleagues from the U.S. Geological Survey who arrived in Alaska after the quake to
quickly take stock of the damage. Fountain then turns back the clock for several chapters of backstory,
detailing the lives of residents of the small village of Chenega and the little town of Valdez, both soon to be
devastated by the quake. A multipart biographical sketch of Plafker sandwiches a brief history of Alfred
Wegener's continental-drift hypothesis, followed by still more pre-quake background on residents of the
affected locales. Fountain sidetracks once more to discuss previous seismic activity in Alaska before finally
presenting the actual quake. He tallies the lives lost, saved, and changed, only returning to Plafker and his
paradigm-changing work supporting Wegener's idea for the final two chapters. Readers interested in the
human toll of Alaska's Good Friday Quake will appreciate the story, but those looking for an in-depth
scientific discussion will need to look elsewhere. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the
Planet." Publishers Weekly, 5 June 2017, p. 44. General OneFile,
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THE NEW YORK TIMES CIRCUITS:
How Modern Electronics Work
Kirkus Reviews.
69.16 (Aug. 15, 2001): p1187.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Fountain, Henry--Ed.
THE NEW YORK TIMES CIRCUITS: How Modern Electronics Work
St. Martin's (208 pp.)
$29.95
Nov. 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28439-X
The subtitle tells the story of this collection of technology columns from the New York Times.
Appearing in the Times since the late 1990s, the weekly Circuits section began by describing the basic
principles and devices on which modern electronics is founded--the chip, the bar code, the laser--then
moved on to descriptions of the more sophisticated applications of those fundamental devices: the virtual
first-down line on TV football broadcasts, electronic fences that keep pets from straying, or greeting cards
that play music. Eschewing a chronological sequence, Fountain (the section's deputy editor) organizes
articles into related sections such as Home, Computers and the Internet, Science and Health. As one might
expect, the range of subjects is almost as broad as the electronic revolution itself. Some have become so
ubiquitous that many readers use them on an almost daily basis: TV remote controls, supermarket scanners,
or ATMs. Others, such as ion propulsion or remote-control surgery, remain esoteric, for the present. Each
article includes a graphic overview of its subject in the form of captioned illustrations, with a fuller
explanation in the text. The introduction neatly summarizes just how far we have come in the roughly 125
years since Edison began working with the incandescent light bulb. Paradoxically, many modern products
(the automobile, the airplane, radio) aren't new inventions but refinements of items created nearly a century
ago that are now smaller, quieter, more efficient. The price of progress is accelerated, often planned
obsolescence; a new laptop computer is an antique by the time it leaves the factory, and it's increasingly
difficult to find anyone to repair most household appliances for less than the cost of a replacement.
A clear, readable, fascinating overview of the tools and gadgets of the modern world.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"THE NEW YORK TIMES CIRCUITS: How Modern Electronics Work." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2001,
p. 1187. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A78359865/ITOF?
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‘The Great Quake’ looks at the science behind North America’s biggest earthquake
David James, Book Review Nov 19, 2017 (0)
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FAIRBANKS — The 1964 Good Friday earthquake, the strongest ever recorded in North America, remains a pivotal event in Alaska’s history, but its impact on the science of geology was even more significant. Our understanding of the planet was permanently altered by what occurred that day. This we learn from New York Times science journalist Henry Fountain’s recently published book, “The Great Quake,” which explores the catastrophe and its aftermath on three levels.
The first and most obvious story that Fountain examines is the earthquake itself. Ultimately assigned a magnitude of 9.2, it hit on March 27, 1964, at 5:36 p.m., lasting four to five minutes. The death toll hit 139, with most people perishing not in the violence of the quake but to the consequent tsunamis that took lives along Alaska’s coast and as far away as Oregon and Northern California.
The middle third of Fountain’s excellent book is a vivid and detailed account of the quake, the tsunamis, and the days that followed as stunned and grieving survivors confronted the wreckage their world had suddenly become. The gripping narrative is drawn from interviews, reports from the time, and later recollections of those who were there.
In Anchorage, entire neighborhoods slid to the shore while one side of Fourth Avenue dropped 10 feet. The city suffered extensive damage but surprisingly few deaths.
Not in Valdez, where the ground liquified and the shoreline sank, swallowing some 30 people. Just offshore, a 441-foot cargo ship that had arrived earlier that day was thrust about so violently that at some points its propeller rose above the tops of roofs. Successive tidal waves rolled over the town and claimed still more lives.
Meanwhile, in Prince William Sound, the Alutiiq village of Chenega, which clung to the shore of an island of the same name, was struck by a tsunami that reached 70 feet above sea level before retreating. About a third of the tiny community’s approximately 80 residents were swept away in the backwash.
Fountain writes of “hemlocks that had been snapped in half at midtrunk height; spruces that were split vertically as the ground cracked beneath them; heavy equipment that had been moved hundreds of feet; hillsides that had been stripped bare of vegetation by the scouring action of water; one-ton boulders found halfway up slopes; roads split down the middle and sunk ten feet or more on one side; rail lines in tangles; brick building facades in jumbled heaps; cars upside down; houses upside down; boats littering streets.”
The top 500 feet of a mountain near Cordova collapsed down a nearby glacier. Fires erupted in the town itself. It would be rebuilt, as would Anchorage. Valdez was relocated four miles away on more stable ground. Chenega was simply abandoned, with some of its surviving residents later establishing a new community on the mainland.
The second part of Fountain’s story is about George Plafker, a mineral geologist who worked for the United States Geological Survey. Though based out of California, he had been assigned to Alaska for several years and was well familiar with its geology. The day after the earthquake he was sent north to report on the damage, and it would ultimately fall on him to explain what caused the quake.
At the time Plafker had only completed his BS and was a field geologist, not a theorist. As someone who valued hands-on work over desk and lab studies, he had spent months traveling Alaska by foot, learning how it was assembled. This made him the perfect person to figure out what had happened. His finding would play a major role in the revolution that was taking place in the science of geology during the 1960s, the third theme of this book.
At the time of the disaster, continental drift — the notion that the planet’s crust is comprised of numerous plates continually moving against each other — was still a controversial idea in geology. The prevailing view held that the planet was essentially stable and that earthquakes were caused by vertical faults like the famed San Andreas Fault in California that triggered the 1906 San Francisco quake. Indeed, the first paper published on the Good Friday earthquake, authored by a highly esteemed Ph.D. geologist, postulated that some undetected vertical fault was to blame.
Plafker, however, knew from looking at the results of the quake that vertical movement could not explain it. Parts of Alaska had sunk and other parts had risen. The only viable reason would by a horizontal fault. Aware of the debate within his field over what is now known as plate tectonics, Plafker concluded that the quake had been caused by the subduction of a plate underneath the Pacific Ocean pushing beneath the plate underlying coastal Alaska. Pressure in the contact area reached a breaking point and it all slid, wreaking massive havoc in the doing.
Plafker’s paper on his findings was accepted by the journal Science. He became a celebrity in geology circles and later went on to earn a Ph.D. and devote his career to earthquake studies. A humble man who, as we learn in this book, became a geologist almost by accident, he successfully challenged the longstanding beliefs of renowned researchers and was a key figure in the complete overhaul of our understanding of the planet.
The scientific side of this story is told in greater detail in Jerry Thompson’s 2011 book “Cascadia’s Fault.” Although primarily concerned with the fault along the Pacific Northwest coast that presents a looming threat of massive proportions, Thompson also explores Alaska’s quake, Plafker’s findings, and the emergence of plate tectonics as the theory that explains modern geology. It’s a worthy companion to this book.
Fountain’s volume is more narrowly focused on one event and its ramifications and tells the Alaska part of the story more thoroughly than any currently available work. Even most state residents are likely unaware of the role our earthquake played in reshaping geology. It was tectonic on more than one level.
David James is a freelance writer who lives in Fairbanks. He can be reached at nobugsinak@gmail.com.
‘The Great Quake,’ by Henry Fountain
By Mary Ellen Hannibal Published 1:42 pm, Friday, August 11, 2017
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Bay Area residents take the term “earthquake” very personally. Many of us remember the epic ground-shaking of the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, and no matter how many teams of engineers tell us not to, we worry about being anywhere near the sinking Millennium Tower when the next big one hits. Historically, a significant before-and-after are marked by the 1906 quake and the subsequent fires that destroyed most of San Francisco. The slow reboot that followed set down the structural template upon which our contemporary metropolis is built. We know earthquakes as terrifying yet transformational events in which geological history abruptly rearranges human history. And we are in awe.
How, exactly, do earthquakes work? In his entertaining and enlightening book, “The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet,” Henry Fountain tells the story of what is sometimes called “Alaska’s Good Friday Earthquake.” On March 27, 1964, a 9.2-magnitude quake shook the state to its core, both literally and metaphorically. Partly because of Alaska’s sparse population, the overall death toll was only 131. It speaks to the power of the quake, however, that several of those who died were victims as far south as Oregon and California — one fatality due to gigantic waves in Bolinas Bay. The Alaska quake is impressive in and of itself. The way it deployed also shed new light on how we understand both earthquakes and the whole tectonic framework in which they occur.
Fountain, a reporter and editor at the New York Times, focuses much of his narrative on George Plafker, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist, who teased out lessons from the Good Friday quake to help establish fundamental concepts about the deep workings of the Earth. An unassuming technician who spent eight years of his childhood in a Brooklyn orphanage, Plafker is an everyman distinguished by curiosity and persistence. His interest in rocks and what makes them move got an early boost from a geology professor at Brooklyn College who took his students on field trips around the New York metropolitan area. Fountain memorably evokes an era in which impoverished students happily crowded around their Svengali to hear tall geological tales while consuming beer, beans and bread at the Clam Broth House on Newark Avenue in Hoboken, N.J.
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The story of Plafker’s path to the Alaska quake is interspersed with a narrative explanation of how science has grappled with the shapes and placement of the continents and how they got that way. As early as 1911, Alfred Wegener put forward an idea that came to be known as “continental drift,” suggesting that though we think of Earth’s largest land masses as stationary, in fact they are on the move. Wegener opined that the Earth was once comprised of a single supercontinent, a giant land mass he called Pangaea. About 175 million years ago, Pangaea started to break up. As gigantic land masses separated, their leading edges crumpled and formed mountains. Wegener’s idea was reviled, partly because he was not a professional geologist, and because he did not identify a plausible mechanism by which the continents travel. Well after Wegener’s death, the phenomenon of seafloor spreading provided an explanation — hot rock welling up from Earth’s mantle creates a conveyor belt upon which continents ride.
In contrast to the painstaking process by which science arrives at its certainties, an earthquake takes just a few minutes to reorder reality. Fountain sets the scene for an abrupt wake-up call, and his description of how it unfolds is gripping. Take Bob Atwood’s experience. The publisher of the Anchorage Times was practicing the trumpet that fateful afternoon. The motion of the Earth as the event started was gentle at first, then “Alaskans began to see and hear things they’d never seen or heard before.” Shock waves tore through pavement and buildings, and the land resembled a stormy sea. A deep roar engulfed the atmosphere. Atwood escaped his house, then watched it essentially explode. “Suddenly a crevasse opened beneath his feet, and he was falling.” He notices that tree stumps, fence posts and boulder-size chunks of frozen soil are falling with him. Miraculously, he lands in sand. He is still holding his trumpet. Then he observes his neighbor’s house, sliding toward him.
The day after the quake, Plafker flew to Alaska. Perusing thousands of devastated miles, he looked in vain for evidence of what must be a huge fault responsible for such a rupture. Frank Press, the head of the seismology lab at the California Institute of Technology, concluded that the quake was caused by a “dip-slip” fault, in which one block of crust moves past another vertically. Plafker was unknown compared to the highly accomplished Press, but he disagreed. Plafker thought that rather the quake had been caused by a “thrust” fault. Pressure mounts where the oceanic crust of the Earth slides under the continental crust, building friction until the strain becomes so great that there is a “sudden release of an enormous amount of stored up energy.”
Press eventually conceded that Plafker was right; and the Alaskan quake was eventually credited to a “megathrust” fault. It demonstrated Wegener’s essential correctness and helped quantify the synthesis of Earth science today known as plate tectonics. All it took was years and years of careful consideration and a fateful five minutes.
Mary Ellen Hannibal is the author of “Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction,” now in paperback. Email: books@sfchronicle.com
The Great Quake
How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet
By Henry Fountain
(Crown; 277 pages; $28)
How a 9.2 earthquake in Alaska in 1964 changed our understanding is explained in 'The Great Quake'
By STEPHEN PHILLIPS
AUG 04, 2017 | 10:00 AM
How a 9.2 earthquake in Alaska in 1964 changed our understanding is explained in 'The Great Quake'
Fissures in a road after the 1964 earthquake in Alaska. (Associated Press)
Geological tumult is all around us in the American West, in our vertiginous topography and in our heads — fear of the Big One. But a little over half a century ago there came what, befitting its magnitude and locale — in the "Great Land" of the Aleut — may be called the Great One. Henry Fountain's "The Great Quake" is dedicated to the five terrifyingly convulsive minutes around dinnertime on March 27, 1964, when the forces of geological upheaval, normally beneath our threshold of perception, violently obtruded into human time, reconfiguring not only the landscape of south central Alaska but our understanding of earthquakes and the risk posed today by the Big One and Really Big One.
For an idea of its power, consider the 1994 temblor that shook Northridge, killing 57, lasted a brisk 30 seconds at most. The Alaskan earthquake registered 9.2 on the Richter Scale (many times stronger than the biggest quake predicted along the San Andreas fault), making it the most forceful tremor ever recorded in North America. Globally, it's second only to the 9.5 Chilean earthquake of 1960. Had it struck any sort of population density, the loss of life would have been calamitous. As it was, 131 people died (including 16 in Oregon and California — swept away by tsunamis that inundated the West Coast and points south). Fountain locates part of his story in the two communities that bore the brunt — Chenega and Valdez. They're emblematic of a still-germinal Alaskan state (admitted to the Union in 1959): a native fishing village, population 75 — mostly related to one another — and old gold rush boomtown numbering 841 souls sustained since then as a transportation hub.
The ground itself was starting to break into strange, angular blocks, some rotating up and others down. It was as if swarms of organisms were inside the soil.
HENRY FOUNTAIN.
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Avoiding portentousness, Fountain, a veteran New York Times science reporter, paints a deft portrait of life in these remote outposts. In Chenega it revolves around subsistence fishing and hunting and — legacy of an earlier overlord — the Russian Orthodox Church. And in Valdez, also economically marginal, life centers around the arrival of supply ships from Seattle, the unloading of which afford not only a spectacle for a town otherwise short on diversions but extra income for its underemployed. As the zero-hour approaches, myriad micro-acts seal fates, such as the decision to greet a new arrival at Valdez's dock, which would collapse and pitch all on it into turbid ocean. Scenes of quotidian life trail off in ellipses: the sci-fi puppetry of "Fireball XL5" plays on televisions in Anchorage, farther from the epicenter but still pummeled.
An Anchorage home torn apart by the Alaska earthquake, March 27, 1964.
An Anchorage home torn apart by the Alaska earthquake, March 27, 1964. (W.R. Hansen / U.S. Geological Survey)
Fountain isn't a showy writer, but there's a fever-dream quality to his account of those five minutes that "made the earth ring like a bell" that captures the hallucinogenic oddness of a world off-kilter, out-of-joint, suddenly uncooperative. Combinations of words with no earthly business being together occur. "[H]ouses seemed to dance in place," he writes. Elsewhere, "Stairways wriggled and writhed." Later, "the ground itself was starting to break into strange, angular blocks, some rotating up and others down. It was as if swarms of organisms were inside the soil, giving it life." Or, "the rocks … began to bounce, like the ball in a game of jacks."
Trees and buildings whipsaw, solid ground behaves like liquid, land cleaves apart, a comic symphony of water and sewage strikes up from exposed plumbing, the rakish progress of furniture across an Anchorage room later cues scientists to the course of the tremor. It's a reminder of the puniness of our world when the earth shrugs.
Finally, there's the spooky latency as the tide recedes — "to a distance of about a quarter of a mile and a depth of more than 120 feet" at Chenega — the preface to tsunamis that would be the killing blow for most victims. Afterward, the ocean runs red with dead fish flushed from the depths by turbulence, possibly stricken by a variant of "the bends" that afflict deep-sea divers surfacing prematurely.
It’s a reminder of the puniness of our world when the earth shrugs.
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Don't infer from this, though, that "The Great Quake" is simply a superior form of disaster porn. Fountain has written a braided narrative about the dialectic between scientific theory and observation that situates the Alaskan earthquake amid a decades-long quest to understand how the landscape around us evolved.
It's an odyssey that begins with an oddball German polymath Alfred Wegener, who, gazing upon an atlas in 1911, notices the parallelism between the east coast of South America and west coast of Africa and posits that today's continents originated in a unitary landmass he names Pangea.
Henry Fountain.
Henry Fountain. (Fred R. Conrad)
Wegener stumbles, however, in supplying a plausible engine for continental drift. Later scientists suggest one: magma disgorged from the Earth mid-ocean that, impelled by the circular motion of convection, spreads the seabed, driving continents apart (at the stately pace of half an inch a year), but this remains an unsubstantiated theory — one author calling it "an essay in geopoetry."
Enter George Plafker, product of Yonkers' Hebrew National Orphan Home and Brooklyn College and implacable old-school rockhound, tasked by the U.S. Geological Survey with assessing the quake-wrought destruction on the ground. Traversing Alaska's shattered coastline by barge and bush plane, he employs the field geologist's tools — hammer, spirit level, compass, notepad and, to "read" the landscape, his eyes. He also applies the theoretical tool set furnished by Wegener and his heirs.
The analysis Plafker produces the following year in Science magazine describes the quake as the product of magma wedging the Pacific Ocean floor under North America, compacting the latter until it gave way. "[W]hen the fault ruptured," Fountain writes, "the continental crust rebounded like a spring, up and out." Plafker had laid out the dynamics of what is today called the "megathrust" earthquake, the type that decimated parts of Japan in 2011 and now imperils the Pacific Northwest. He'd also cemented acceptance of plate tectonics, the idea the Earth is fissured by grinding plates that, Fountain writes, supplies a master key for understanding not only earthquakes but "all the geological features and processes that humans have wondered about for centuries."
Interleaving snapshots of a lost world, the primal power of nature and high science, "The Great Quake" is an outstanding work of nonfiction. It's also a reminder that the original agent of creative destruction resides not in the corporate boardroom, ivory tower or artist's salon but beneath our feet.
Phillips is a writer in Portland, Ore. He's written for the Atlantic, NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Financial Times, Times Higher Education and the South China Morning Post, among other publications.
"The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet" by Henry Fountain.
"The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet" by Henry Fountain. (Crown)
"The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet"
Henry Fountain
Crown: 288 pp., $28
Books, Et Al.
Book and media reviews from the journal Science, edited by Valerie Thompson.
Valerie Thompson
Valerie Thompson, Editor
BOOK PLATE TECTONICS, SEISMOLOGY
A pair of books explores American earthquakes, past and future
By Richard J. Murnane August 8, 2017
The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet
Henry Fountain
Crown,
2017
296 pp.
Purchase this item now
Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake
Kathryn Miles
Dutton
2017
368 pp.
Purchase this item now
On 27 March 1964, a magnitude (M) 9.2 earthquake—the second strongest in recorded history—occurred near Prince William Sound in southern Alaska. The event produced a tsunami, induced numerous landslides, and liquefied soils. The loss of life was relatively small—143 fatalities—but, as Henry Fountain reveals in The Great Quake, the disaster’s impact still looms large.
The book engagingly recounts life in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, which came to be known as the “Great Alaskan earthquake” or, alternatively, the “Good Friday earthquake,” and explores the changes in the lives of individuals, villages, and cities touched by it. Chenega, for example, a tiny village located on the sound’s Chenega Island, figures prominently in the narrative. It was completely destroyed by the quake, which also killed a third of the community; the villagers who survived fled and never returned.
The book also describes the quake’s role in the career of George Plafker, the geologist whose fieldwork and analysis would help ultimately confirm the theory of plate tectonics. Fountain describes how, in the months following the earthquake, Plafker and colleagues cruised the Alaskan shoreline, measuring the distance between sea level and a narrow band of northern acorn barnacles. Barnacles, he explains, tend to settle near the tidal level of mean high water. After the quake, when the line of barnacles was observed above sea level, the researchers inferred that the ground had been uplifted. When it was below sea level, they surmised that the ground had subsided. The spatial distribution of uplift and subsidence, along with additional data collected by the U.S. Geological Survey, allowed Plafker to correctly infer that the earthquake was produced by a low-angle thrust fault associated with the subduction of ocean crust below the continental margin.
The detective work involved in reconstructing land movements produced by an earthquake is itself a compelling tale, but interwoven throughout The Great Quake are more personal accounts of this and other notable earthquakes. Fountain relates, for example, the amazing story of how Howard Ulrich, who was anchored in a small fishing boat in Lituya Bay, somehow navigated up and over an enormous wave—the highest ever documented run-up of a tsunami at 524 m above sea level—after a landslide caused by an earthquake in 1958. Ulrich “looked down on the shore and thought that if the wave broke he’d end up in the treetops,” writes Fountain. “But it didn’t break, and instead he rode up and over the crest.”
The M 5.8 earthquake that shook western Montana just weeks ago is a reminder that U.S. earthquakes are not limited to the “ring of fire.” In Kathryn Miles’s book Quakeland, she recounts an M 7.5 1959 earthquake that occurred in this same region. The Hebgen Lake earthquake, as it is known, produced the nation’s largest recorded earthquake-induced landslide—73 million metric tons—and caused at least 28 fatalities. Although tragic, the quake was neither the most costly nor the most deadly. But, as Miles points out, it forces us to confront the fact that while our knowledge of earthquake hazard has evolved, in many cases our infrastructure has not.
THE U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
The Good Friday earthquake caused major structural damage in Anchorage and other parts of Alaska in 1964.
Quakeland offers a guided tour of seismic hazards throughout the United States. In addition to covering earthquake hazards in the western states, Miles provides an accessible overview of midplate seismicity in regions such as New Madrid and New York City. She also discusses seismicity produced by, for example, fracking and mining.
Miles describes how our built environment, including dams, bridges, and buildings, can (or cannot) withstand earthquakes and their associated secondary hazards. The experts she interviews acknowledge that improving our resilience can be expensive, but the consequences for not doing so are often far more costly.
Improved construction practices precipitated by past disasters, as well as technological advances, are on the rise. But, while more seismically active areas are acting to improve resilience, Miles makes it clear that other regions of the United States could benefit from similar actions. “We just have no consciousness towards earthquakes in the eastern United States,” geophysicist Charles Merguerian tells her at one point. “And that’s a big mistake.”
These books are both accessible accounts that complement one another. Readers interested in the history of plate tectonics, seismic risk, and our society’s vulnerability would likely enjoy them both.
About the author
The reviewer is at NatCatRisk, LLC, Garrett Park, MD 20896, USA.
Book review: 'The Great Quake' shook up conventional thinking about geophysics
By JEFF SCHULZE THE FREE LANCE–STAR Sep 30, 2017 (0)
The Great Quake
The Great Quake
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Our natural world won’t give up its secrets easily. They’re held high in the atmosphere, deep in the oceans, buried underground.
Usually, it takes the individuals with keen minds and steadfast persistence decades to understand why the forces of nature do what they do. But in infrequent instances, an event will take place that serves as the missing piece to an enormous scientific jigsaw puzzle. It hastens researchers’ efforts to understand the planet’s past and forecast its future.
Such is the case with the earthquake that struck southern Alaska in 1964. The disaster and its aftermath offered up a treasure trove of topographical evidence. One dedicated geologist used his surveys of the shaken land to help transform the scientific community’s understanding of how mountains and continents move and change—and the resulting seismic activity.
This is the general premise of Henry Fountain’s book, but in actuality, he tells two stories: 1) the dogged investigative work by unheralded geologist George Plafker, and 2) the mid-1960 Alaskans whose lives were turned upside-down by an extraordinary natural event.
The narrative chosen by Fountain, a science writer for The New York Times, is one-third part murder mystery (a “who done it?”, or in this case, a “what done it?”) one-third part chronology of geo-researchers study of the Earth’s crust, and one-third part ode to a way of life for old-school Alaskans.
The book appeals equally to the brain and the heart. Fountain balances the recount of the cold, intellectual work pursued by Plafker with emotional, heart-wrenching tales of Alaskans’ desperate efforts to evade tsunamis, landslides and crevices.
While numerous pages are devoted to the quake’s survivors and how they attempted to rebuild their lives, Plafker is the central focus. His story epitomizes human curiosity at its finest: he’s a field geologist, never envisioning his work will impact geophysics. Yet his quest to understand and document what he is witnessing leads to a breakthrough in understanding plate tectonics theory.
And “The Great Quake” offers a cautionary tale. Mid-20th century Alaskans determined not “to let nature run wild” built communities in what proved to be deadly locations near fault lines. As populations swell along similar coastal areas near shifting ocean and continental crusts (the Pacific Northwest, anyone?), are we settling the table for a deadlier reoccurrence?
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Jeff Schulze is a night sports content editor at The Free Lance–Star.
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