Natural beauty and terror

Marina Salandy-Brown writes a weekly column for the Newsday. 

Beauty and horror are as much the flip side of the coin as are love and hate, black and white, or rich and poor. I have to keep reminding myself of this fact if I am to have the courage to live through the next year or two.

I let the beauty of last Saturday’s incredibly stunning moon warm my heart and blot out a creeping fear that is becoming like a heavy cloak on my shoulders. The moon was especially large and for a short while it looked like a mysteriously opaque grey disc that hung low in the pewter grey twilight, so fabulous and so very close that I felt I could reach out and touch it. Within moments it rose and brightened to a blazing-white silver, flooding the sky with light. I later realised that I might have witnessed this year’s only supermoon which appears only when, during its monthly orbit, the moon is full at the same time as its proximity to Earth is nearest – 16,139 miles closer than the normal 238,900.

I wish, however, I had not read about another natural phenomenon, the opposite of the glorious supermoon–earthquakes. Every year 60,000 people worldwide die from natural disasters, the majority of them in earthquakes. The annual average number of major quakes is fifteen, so we were spared this year with only seven, but we know how much destruction and death worldwide they caused. It is difficult, therefore, to fathom that the 2017 number could treble or quadruple and particularly in areas around the equator where about a billion of us live.

The grave warning comes from two US scientists who have made the link between Earth’s rotation and increased and catastrophic seismic activity. Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado in Boulder and Rebecca Bendick of the University of Montana recently presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America on their observations that the Earth’s rotation is in another cyclical phase of slowing down, which is always followed by hyper activity. This cycle started in 2011 and the scientists reckon that in 2018 we are very likely to experience many more earthquakes of 7 or higher magnitude.

Who’s afraid of earthquakes? We all are, is the simple answer. It is one of the few assertions that is guaranteed to attract no dissent. I imagine it is the randomness of those earth shifters that strikes fear into our hearts, yet the pattern of earthquakes that is emerging suggests a rhythm. Study reveals that every 30 years there is an increase of up to 30 per cent in the number of big quakes in the planet’s equatorial areas. What is unknown is exactly where it will happen or when and how big.

In TT we have, so far, been spared, and so we are unprepared for anything much bigger than the mild tremors to which we have become accustomed. Experiencing a powerful earthquake has to be one of life’s most unforgettable events. Only by having that memory etched onto one’s brain and locked into one’s senses can one appreciate how vulnerable we are. In Mexico City it was my misfortune to be on an upper floor of a skyscraper when it began swaying, sending chairs rolling into glass walls, and desks sliding across the floor. But it was also my good fortune that the earthquake happened while I was in that modern, quakeproof building that absorbed the tremor. People died that day. I only felt that I had died.

We in TT can do little to ensure that when our luck runs out and it is our turn to rumble that we can be safe when the majority of our buildings meet few building code standards. I try to remember the adage that earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do, but we cannot guarantee that our homes and certainly not our work places are sensibly built. The prospect of making my home completely quakeproof is hugely daunting, and I wonder about the advantage of trimming my tall trees when the electricity poles outside my garden wall are almost definitely not quakeproof.

The people of California live astride a lively seismic fault line but they are not paranoid like me because their chances of surviving a big one are relatively high, since they are well drilled in all aspects of preparing for, living through, and dealing with the aftermath, unlike us. See the useful online guide from the Southern California Earthquake Centre at www.earthquakecountry.org/roots/ and keep praying that our luck holds.

Editor’s note: Prof Ramesh Deosaran returns to this space next week.

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