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Author Interview
Henry Ferris: Hi, this is Henry Ferris. I'm an editor at Harper Collins and I'm speaking with Simon Winchester about his new book, A Crack in the Edge of the World. Simon, your last book was about the explosion of the Krakatoa volcano in the late 19th century and before that you wrote about William Smith and the geological map that changed the world. Should we see a connection between those books and this new one?
Simon Winchester: Well, I suppose so, really. I had studied geology in Oxford back in the 1960s, and I wouldn't say that I'd forgotten it all but I'd certainly not been a geologist. I did one year working in Uganda in 1967, and, then essentially abandoned it and went off and worked as a foreign correspondent and did all sorts of other things. But after I wrote a book called The Professor and the Madman, about seven or eight years ago now, we were casting around wondering what to do next, and, by then Editor Larry Ashmead, your predecessor, said, "Was there anyone fascinating from the world of geology?" because oddly enough Larry was a geologist in his youth before he came into working as a publisher. And, I remembered this chap called William Smith who was the creator of the first ever geological map and it did seem that his life was interesting. Not only had he created this map, but it had been plagiarized, and he lost a lot of money, had gone bankrupt, had gone to debtors' prison. His wife went mad. She turned into a raging nymphomaniac and all the sort of ingredients that The Professor and the Madman had.
So, it was agreed that I'd write that book, and that wetted my appetite for the geology that I'd abandoned all those, I mean, four decades before. So, The Map that Changed the World, the story of William Smith, did rather well and I thought, my word, you know, geology is not, so far as the reading public is concerned, as dull as I'd anticipated it might be. So, then we had a discussion. Well, you know, if geology is setting people on fire, then there's a story, I said to Larry, actually, that I'd love to tell, which is the story of the Krakatoa eruption. And, so, that followed The Map that Changed the World as the second geological book. And that also did, by great, good fortune, quite well, as well. So, I then thought, well, my gosh, let's go for broke, because here's another fantastically good story, which has all the elements that underpin the geology that made Krakatoa so interesting. All the new science that people haven't written about for 20 or 30 years, which was the destruction of San Francisco in April the 18, 1906, and it happened also not only was a great story not only does it illustrate this new aspect to geology how it's changed so much since I studied it but April, 2006 is of course the 100th anniversary and, you know, being a journalist, I'm very alive, perhaps rather more alive than I should be, two anniversaries, particularly, centenaries. So all the curves seem to coincide to make it seem a pretty decent idea to write a book about San Francisco.
So, yes the three books are interconnected and that they reflect I suppose my real enthusiasm and excitement and reconnect with a field of study that I had abandoned so long ago. And the one person that's particularly pleased in all of this is, is my old tutor Harold Redding in Oxford because he knew I'd become a journalist and an author, and, I think he was ever so slightly disappointed. He thought he had taught me well enough and I would remain enthusiastic. But then when he heard I was writing about William Smith he was so thrilled and he helped me enormously and I dedicated the book to him. He liked Krakatoa and, I hope very much, he is going to like San Francisco.
Henry Ferris: Well, I'm sure he will love it. Can you tell us a little bit about what actually caused that earthquake in San Francisco in 1906 and what caused the largest amount of destruction as a result of it?
Simon Winchester: Well, to put it at its simplest, this is mechanically, quite difficult thing, to conceive of. The earthquake was caused by two tectonic plates sliding along side each other. On the left hand side, the west side, under the Pacific Ocean, essentially is the Pacific Plate. And it is moving northward, so about an inch and a half a year, against, so sliding up against, the North American plate, which remains more or less static, and it's been sliding for about 15 million years. Up in the north, it's essentially stuck, almost as if it was held together by rust. The two plates can't slip past each other and every so often because the underlying plate is moving at one and a half inches a year, the tension that builds up because above it the rocks are locked, gives way. When it gives way, suddenly this rupture causes an enormous amount of ground movement, all the kinetic energy that's been stored by this pressure that's been built up over the past decades, so, in the case of San Francisco, several hundred years is suddenly released in a matter of microseconds and a huge sort of burst of energy careens through the ground like a tidal wave or a plowshare going at 7,000, 8,000, 10,000 miles an hour. And it moves, in the case of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, it displaced the earth by 21 feet.
Imagine this road suddenly moving in a matter of microseconds, 21 feet, you know, we'd all be knocked over. All the beams, all the glass, everything would break. And that's what happened. San Francisco was born not very long before the earthquake. It was born essentially in the 1840s. This earthquake happened in 1906, only 60 years later. All the gold rush miners that flooded into San Francisco in the 1840s, didn't have any idea that underneath was this fault. It might have got a few clues in the 1860s when there was a little rash of earthquakes, but, then they put up their pleasure palaces, and hotels, and bars, and apartment houses, and magnificent mansions, completely unaware that lurking underneath was this monster, the San Andreas Fault, which was the fault that marks the point where the two plates are sliding past each other. And then 12 minutes past five on that Wednesday morning, the 18th of April, 1906, it ruptured and brought down thousands of buildings. It also, significantly, ruptured the water mains and the gas lines, and it caused electricity poles to fall down and their wires would cross and arc and then cooking fires, and chimneys, and kerosene all combined to cause an enormous fire, which because the hydrants were broken or the mains were broken, couldn't be fought. The fire essentially turned into a fire storm like in Dresden and like in Berlin or Tokyo and the city was just about totally destroyed by fire. So, the San Andreas Fault caused the earthquake, the earthquake caused the fire and the fire destroyed the city.
Henry Ferris: To get back to the San Andreas Fault you were just mentioning. You have a chapter in your book specifically about the Fault called, "The Mischief Maker," which is a very fun title. What is it about this fault that makes it so mischievous?
Simon Winchester: I think it's its shear capriciousness -- that we never know when it's likely to misbehave. It's 720 miles long and is curved like a great boomerang. It starts up in Humboldt County and the cold misty north of the state of California and it ends southeast of Los Angeles in the salt and sea down by the Imperial Valley and the Mexican border. It can essentially be divided into three parts, the northern part, where San Francisco is, it is locked solid, the southern part goes through Palm Springs and Indio, and Pasadena and east of Los Angeles. It is locked solid. In the middle, in the very uninhabited part of California, east of the town of Pasa Robles, basically around a little town called Parkfield, well-known to some people because that's where James Dean was killed when his car crashed in 1955. That fault there is moving all the time. Microscopically, micron by micron by micron, all the time and so scientists have suddenly begun to think in the last couple of years that if they examine very closely, the mechanics of, how exactly the Fault moves in the places where it is unlocked in the middle, then that might give them a clue to exactly what will happen, when it moves in the places where it's locked and where its movements cause such catastrophes in the north of California and in the far south of California.
And so they've done something quite unprecedented, which has never been done before. They've started drilling a hole into the Fault. It's a thing called SAFOD, San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth, and they've drilled a hole down into it and then through the junction between the two plates, so the drilling rig stands on the Pacific Plate, the hole goes down two or three miles and then bends in the way that these very clever oil drilling people can do, so, that it moves into the North American Plate. And they're putting thousands of senses, it's costing a great deal of money, and, they hope that they will understand why it does such mischief. So, I call the chapter "The Mischief Maker" simply because it does cause mischief, but what we want to know is why and how. And the hope is that this drilling rig will tell us.
Henry Ferris: One of the things that I found most fascinating about your book is how you put the earthquake in the context of history. Tell us a little bit about how this particular earthquake, the one in 1906, affected the future of that city, the state of California, and, for that matter the rest of the 20th century in America?
Simon Winchester: Well, it's a very complicated series of things seem to have happened. I mean, for instance, on a trivial level, it drove all the artists out of San Francisco. So, for a long time this city which had been famous for Mark Twain and Jack London and Ambrose Pierce and all these luminaries and for the Bohemians. Suddenly, all these people scuttled off to the hills, and for a good 20 or 30 or 40 years San Francisco was a cultural wilderness. But that of course isn't one of the truly important things that happened. Importantly, people starting to take earthquakes seriously and building their buildings in a strong fashion, so it had effects on the way the city was built and the preparation so that should another disaster happen they would be a little bit better prepared for it. It had interesting sociological consequences, too. One of the things that fascinated me, not least because it seems to have happened in the aftermath of Krakatoa, was that it had an effect on religion. After Krakatoa, you had a lot of people who were Islamic saying this is clearly a sign from Allah. This volcano is a sign that he's angry. We must rise up and kill our rulers, the Dutch, and drive them out. And essentially they did. And one might argue that Krakatoa triggered the first militant fundamentalist Islamic uprising in the world-a long, long time before Israel 1948 and all those things. A similar thing happened in California not, however, with the Muslims but with fundamentalist Christians. There was a church down in Los Angeles in a place called Azusa Street, which was a fledgling church of people who called themselves Pentecostalists. They spoke in tongues, they waved their arms around and did all sorts of crazy things. All things that would appear to others as crazy. And all that sort of direction came about because of manifestations as they saw it from God. He would send signs down. Miracles would be called. People would, as I mentioned, talk in tongues. On the week before the San Francisco earthquake, this little church had a modest-size meeting, and a couple of people spoke in tongues, and it was all going along quite nicely, but the Pastor stood up and said we are expecting a sign from the Lord.
Three days later San Francisco, arguably the most sinful of all American cities given over to drinking and whoring and gambling and all those fun things that happened in the aftermath of the gold rush days. But a city that lived for fun, for sin was destroyed by an earthquake. And so the Pastor, not unreasonably, said, well there's no doubt about it, this is the sign from God that we've been waiting for. And suddenly this little church was overrun with people, I mean tens of thousands of people came, they had overspill locations. It became like the Crystal Cathedral that you see in Los Angeles today and the link is not actually an unreasonable one to make because out of the Pentecostalist church that began in essentially 1906 came all the great evangelical movements from Aimee Semple McPherson right through to Pat Robertson and Tammy Fay and Jim Bakker. One might argue--and I don't want to make too much of this--that the power of the Christian right and particularly the Pentecostal brand of Evangelicals has had a crucially important effect on contemporary American politics. That movement was triggered in large part by what was perceived as a sign from God on April 18, 1906. So, the downstream effects of the San Francisco earthquake, if you do say, it caused Pentecostalism, it gave us conservative Christianity, and it gave us certain political effects that are being felt around the world.
It does underpin the overarching theory of this book which is the Guyer Theory, which holds that the whole world is an interconnected system where everything leads onto everything else. And to think that an earthquake in San Francisco had an effect on global politics in 2005, 2006 maybe stretching credulity a little, but to a geologist it's not completely fanciful.
Henry Ferris: Sounds reasonable. This past year it seems that we've seen a whole string of geological happenings, in particular earthquakes, from the earthquake in Iran to this past holiday season the Tsunami in South Asia. What do you think we can learn from the year 1906 to help us understand these things that have happened recently?
Simon Winchester: You know, Henry, that's one of the most interesting things. Here you had, from Boxing day -- well, I'm an Englishman, the 26th of December -- 2003, the devastating earthquake in Bam in Iran and on the 29th of December, 2004, almost to the hour, you had this devastating Tsunami-causing earthquake off the north coast of Sumatra. Between those two bookends of calamity, you had a year full of seismic happenings. Mt. St. Helens was erupting, you had earthquakes in Peru, Chile, Taiwan, China, Japan. I mean it was a very bad seismic year. Lot of people died, lot of places were destroyed. Such years happen infrequently but they do happen.
And 1906 was exactly the same, uncannily the same. We tend to think of it as merely being the year in which the San Francisco event happened but it began with a terrible earthquake off the coast of Columbia and Ecuador. Thousands died. There was an earthquake in St. Lucia. An earthquake in Taiwan, very big, I mean 8 or 9,000 people died in that one. There was an earthquake in the Caucasus. Vesuvius was erupting. Then came the San Francisco earthquake, but as if that wasn't enough, the Port of Valparaiso in Chile was leveled by an earthquake in August with 20,000 people being killed.
Why do certain years become seismically so active? It's beginning to seem now, ever since the whole theory of plate tectonics was put forward that it's not unreasonable to suppose that a sort of butterfly effect happens. That you get a terrible and devastating event on a plate up in the northern hemisphere, let's say in Alaska, and it sends a sort of a cascade of events all around the world, such that something can happen in Sumatra and immediately after the Sumatran event there were 144 earthquakes that are placed on exactly the opposite side of the world in Northern Alaska. The world is like a big, sort of brass bell, and if you hit it really hard, the whole thing vibrates, and so on the far side of the world--seemingly entirely unconnected--other devastating events can happen. It seems to have happened in 2004. It seems certainly to have happened in 1906 and scientists are now fascinated with this idea of this seismic butterfly effect.
Henry Ferris: Thank you.
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