Jim Taylor’s Weblog

Sunday March 7, 2010

A tale of two earthquakes

By Jim Taylor

What causes earthquakes?
        As the physical scars heal in Haiti, the emotional scars remain. Francesca Paola Crabu, a clinical psychologist with Médicins Sans Frontiéres, believes that many Haitians consider the earthquake a sign of “religious punishment.”
        It’s not. But that requires a quick refresher course in Geology 101.
        Despite the impressions we get from our senses, the earth is neither flat nor solid.
        Far beneath the surface we walk on, there’s a massive layer of semi-fluid rock. Think of the consistency of congealed tar – thick, almost solid, but capable of being deformed by heat and pressure.
        And it’s exceedingly hot.
        Like water boiling in a saucepan, this hot gel develops local convection currents. It circulates, slowly but steadily.
        The solid earth we know floats on top of this roiling semi-fluid, like foam on top of a café latté.
        Now think of that circulating gel filling, say, a soccer ball. Except that the pieces of leather that form the skin of the soccer ball are not stitched together. As the sauce inside circulates, the pieces of leather tend to drift along with it.
        Those pieces of leather are our continents. They seem huge to us but they’re actually flotsam swept along by invisible currents.
        And just like debris swirling in a stream, sometimes one edge of a continent is pushed westward by one current, while the opposite edge runs into a contrary eddy that wants it to go eastward.
        That’s what happened in the ocean depths off Chile. A westward moving continent rode up over an eastward moving oceanic plate.

Different kinds of crashes
        Of course, all of this happens in extreme slow motion. About one inch a year. But if you could take one frame of a movie every year, over a million years you would see the western edge of South America crumpling like the front end of a car hitting a concrete wall.
        The Andes mountain range is the visible result of that continental crumpling.
        Some car crashes happen head-on; some strike glancing blows. The Chilean quake was a head-on crash. The Haitian earthquake was a glancing blow, as two continental plates tried to skid past each other.
        Once you grasp this process, you can see that earthquakes are inexorable. They have nothing to do with human misbehaviour. Continental plates do not care what human hitchhikers may be doing on their surface. So earthquakes cannot be punishment for anything – unless you consider it morally wrong to live in an earthquake-prone part of the world.
        Unfortunately for us, some of the most desirable real estate in the world lies in earthquake zones. The Caribbean islands, for example. And the entire Pacific Rim, from Cape Horn through the Mexican Riviera, through California, the B.C. coast, across Alaska’s Aleutian islands to Japan, the Philippines, the Polynesian islands, New Zealand…
        Chile is particularly earthquake prone. The world’s strongest recorded earthquake (9.5 magnitude) struck there in 1960. Six of the world’s most destructive earthquakes (8.5 or greater) have been centred in the ocean trench just off its shores. Anywhere else, its aftershocks would rate as major earthquakes.
        Earthquakes will happen whether or not humans happen to live in the area.

The human factor
        The extent of damage, however, can be directly linked to human involvement.
        Chile had less property damage and far fewer deaths, because it had building codes. Long considered the most European nation in Latin America, Chile requires steel reinforcement, properly mixed concrete, tested materials…. It has universities turning out professional engineers. It has building inspectors….
        Haiti, by contrast, is free enterprise taken to an extreme. Anyone who believes that government should stay out of people’s lives should spend some time in Haiti.
        Anything goes. For cars, buses, buildings… If it doesn’t fall down or break down, it’s okay to use.
        Chile also has efficient social agencies – police, fire departments, military units, health services — able to respond to emergencies. They may not have operated as efficiently as desired. But that’s still better than Haiti, which had no functioning social infrastructure at all.
        That’s why a smaller earthquake did much more damage in Haiti than a much bigger one did in Chile. It has nothing to do with divine retribution; it has a lot to do with human societies.

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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn



“I admit to being caught up in the Olympics,” wrote Jean Skillman, “the pageantry, the medals, the adrenaline of winning, the bitterness of losing, the pleasure of participation. So many of these athletes perform at levels that are entirely equal: nanoseconds apart in timing. For me, those tiny distinctions are meaningless.
        “I agree that just being a participant is cause for celebration. CBC did some radio stories about poor countries who send one athlete who has had only family support to become a world athlete because the country is poor both economically and in governance… Mostly, we see the sacrifice as it relates to the ones who win, or the ones of our own country. I do not object to knowing about Canadian athletes, and I hope other countries are covering their athletes, but a broader base of journalism rounds the story out. Those who lose by the definitions of the medals are often athletes whose achievement is deserving of heroic story. I appreciate those stories for their complex truths, and hope that more will be told.”

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About My Books

Over the years, I think I have written (or ghostwritten) about 17 books. Several of them (mercifully) are no longer available from any source. But here’s a listing of those that are still available. The ones marked “WLB”, you can order from Wood Lake Books, either on-line at http://www.woodlakebooks.com, or call Wood Lake Books directly at 1-800-663-2775 in Canada, 1-800-654-5129 (Pilgrim Press) in the U.S. The ones marked “JT only” are now available only directly from me — as collector’s items, I price them all at $25 Cdn.

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