#reykjansbaer

[eopederson]

Surface views of Tectonic Plate boundaries: Upper - North American plate meets Eurasian plate, Reykjansbaer, ísland, 2023. Lower - Blanco fracture zone or Blanco transform fault zone (BTFZ), Cape Blanco, Oregon, 2024. In the Blanco zone three plates, the North American, the Juan de Fuca, and the Gorda meet.

This afternoon I finished reading The Great Quake by Henry Fountain (2017, Crown, ISBN 9781101904077) about the 1964 Alaska earthquake and its aftermath. While it is not a great work of science writing, it is fascinating for those who like me who remember and had some personal ties to the quake and its aftermath. 

My chief reason for commenting about the book, however, is found in its final chapters. In those Fountain outlines how the quake led to a rethinking of plate tectonics and most importantly to the widespread acceptance of that theory. I am old enough to remember the idea of continental drift, which came to be called plate tectonics, still viewed as a speculative hypothesis. From evidence collected after the 1964 Alaska quake, that hypothesis has been elevated to the status of a theory all but universally accepted by earth scientists. Plate tectonics is to the earth sciences as Darwinian evolution is to the biological sciences, for nothing of consequence can be explained, or even explored, without reference to the movement over time of the tectonic plates of the earth’s outer layer. In considerable measure, the study of the Alaska quake, and an analogue quake a few years earlier off the coast of Chile, two of the largest quakes in human history, provided the evidence which elevated the hypothesis to the status of a fundamental theory. The amazing thing, to me at least, is this step in understanding the earth (and by extension probably many other planets in the universe) took place in my lifetime. When I was a student plate tectonics was discussed as a possibility, but now it is universally accepted as a fact.

Geology, and the earth sciences more generally, are often given short shrift in education (“Rocks for Jocks,” the Mickey Mouse way to fill the undergraduate science requirement at universities), in science journalism and in representation of the sciences in popular culture. There are probably several hundred PBS programs on cute and cuddly animals for each science program episode on geology (or, heaven forbid, geochemistry and geophysics). But the cute and cuddly animals are themselves incidental products of the geological processes which have shaped the surface of the earth. Perhaps there is need for a new Nobel Prize in the geosciences, certainly a more legitimate scientific undertaking than economics, a speculative enterprise at best, for which there is such a prize.