Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Earthquake Prediction and Earthquake Science Fiction

Earthquake Prediction and Earthquake Science Fiction
or How Hollywood and the Usual suspects have crafted and morphed our view of planet Earth
The Tectonic Shift in our view of the world has increasingly come about through a weird combination of science fact and science fiction. Anyone who has seen “The Day After Tomorrow” or the even more extreme “2012” has some idea of how theories based on climate science or geophysics can be morphed by wordsmiths and Hollywood alike into a powerful meme that can and does capture the public imagination. This is generally a good thing but not always.
I must confess to have been a minor party to this re-imagining of an increasingly shaky planet both figuratively and literally speaking myself through Speculative narratives written while living in working abroad in Japan and the UK over a period of years.
In the late 1990’s I was a salary man living in Tokyo. During that time I experienced many large Earthquakes including one that threw me out of bed. It also happened that my father at the time worked as a noted US government scientist in the field of earthquake prediction. This work also had Cold war applications which are now presumably on ice, so to speak. Such prophetic powers to rival the Oracle of Delphi never reached the level aspired to because of the laws of physics (including the Quantum Uncertainty Principle and Chaos Theory) and other technical factors. One important tool for such prediction involving subduction of tectonic plates is an equation- Byerlee’s Law – named after my father Dr. James D. Byerlee. After the aforementioned major quake in Saitama Prefecture and elsewhere near Tokyo, I called my father at USGS in California and asked him about such matters. Whenever I phoned in a panic about the impending Big One he would patiently tell me that the time frame was within days, weeks, months and years yet would surely arrive sometime soon in the Geological near future. This can be measured in centuries yet I took it as a warning for what it was worth. As it happened I did avoid the mega-quake which so tragically struck the east coast of Northern Honshu in early March. The toll in human lives will probably top 30,000 and I do hope that some day a more comprehensive and accurate early warning system is devised so that a highly populated area such as this is better protected. Until then even the most well prepared for such a natural catastrophe (now severely compounded by the nuclear fallout from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant), and the Japanese were certainly frequently and extensively drilled for such an event (I also participated in such drills in Tokyo as a city employee), will find such an ordeal to be a testing one in the extreme.
Which now brings me to the Science Fiction side of this essay; This naturally includes the influence of Hollywood and its ability to whip up paranoia bordering on hysteria, something of a speciality of theirs and undoubtedly in keeping with popular demand. I wrote a science fiction short story called “Precursors” which was then published in an in-flight magazine for ANA, All Nippon Airlines. The through line of this narrative was the use of animal life, including Dolphins, birds and other creatures, to predict Earthquakes. I won’t go beyond this brief explanation and shall direct those interested in reading it to my website davidjamesbnovelist.com where it is attached (along with another Tokyo based narrative “Karen Carpenter’s Last Song”) free of charge. This narrative naturally tapped into my experiences on the ground in Tokyo as well as my exposure to Geo-science.
The natural disaster genre with science fictional overtones has expanded exponentially in the New Millennium. Since the turn of the century there have been a plethora of such doomsday story telling which seemingly addresses widely held fears (one caveat, remember paranoia is the fear of something which doesn’t exist and such dangers including nuclear war were and are real in the most real sense) about Global Warming, Tsunamis, The Greenhouse Effect, Planetary Rupture of all kinds including Volcanos and the aforementioned Earthquakes, Global Freezing and so on.
In the movies physical reality is of course often bent completely out of shape so that you are left with a caricature or counterfeit of life. It might do to remember it’s only a movie; something which can get lost when a grain of truth is morphed into a myth (think of the film JFK in another context) then starts a life of its own as Urban Legend before eventually becoming Public Perception up to and including the highest level of government. The previous president of the US demonstrated on more than one occasion some very fuzzy thinking when it came to how to how the world worked in a geophysical or ideational sense. As with Ronald Reagan, I think he looked to Hollywood when it came to the harder points of natural and human history.
“2012” the movie was in fact voted one of the most misleading, scientifically speaking, by a panel of US government scientists. Paranoid, hysterical visions of the near future and future are nothing new when you look at the scores of Nuclear Holocaust flicks dating from the end of War 2 right up to the present. Sometimes the horror scenario in the genre is even amped up with the addition of aliens. I can hardly wait to see what they will come up with next.
Maybe Liz Hurly dressed up as sexy Wonder Woman will Save the Day before its too late. Stay tuned.