On March 17, a mild earthquake rattled countless Los Angeles-area residents awake shortly before their alarms went off at 6:30 a.m. The Monday morning temblor was the first notable L.A.-area quake in years.
A lengthy vacation from earthquakes certainly sounds nice. But John Dvorak, a geophysicist who now works at a astronomical observatory in Hawaii, warns that a quake break can just be the calm before the earthquake storm.
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He makes his case that the Golden State is in for trouble in his readable and aptly named new book “Earthquake Storms: The Fascinating History and Volatile Future of the San Andreas Fault.”
But it’s not just Californians who should pay attention to his exploration of earthquake science, the unfolding mysteries of geology, and the gaps in our seismic knowledge.
As he notes in an interview, plenty of other parts of the country are vulnerable to earthquakes, including the Northwest, the Midwest, the South and – yes – even the Big Apple.
Q: Scientists weren’t just wrong about earthquakes in the centuries leading up to the 1906 San Francisco quake. They were really wrong. What did they believe?
A: If you go back to the Enlightenment, they thought they were related to chemical explosions. By the 19th century, many scientists said they were caused by large volcanic explosions happening within the Earth.
There was no wide acceptance of the idea that earthquakes were actually caused by the sliding of great crustal blocks against each other until the 1906 earthquake, which ruptured the earth’s surface for almost 300 miles. The ground had actually slid tens of feet along that rupture.