As a seismologist who studied catastrophic earthquakes worldwide for the US government (US Geological Survey) for 22 years and who has since 2002 lived in Adelaide, my mother’s hometown, I was interested to read Rex Jory's article, "No one can predict when the next earthquake will strike Adelaide" (The Advertiser, Monday 16FEB2009).

However, with all due respect to my friend and colleague, David Love, the SA State Seismologist, I don't worry about the possibility of a repeat of the magnitude 5.4 1954 Adelaide Earthquake. Instead, I worry about the certainties of heatwaves, the drying/dying Murray, the bushfires, the floods in Queensland, and the observation of my 70's-year-old Aboriginal cousin from Marree that it no longer cools down in the desert after the sun sets -- all signs of global warming. And I worry about what we will eat when no farm tractors come from overseas anymore, when there is no fuel for the ones we have, no fertilizer to grow crops (even if there were rain), and no fuel for trucks to transport whatever food reserves we might have -- the consequences of peak oil.

After spending two weeks in Los Angeles investigating the magnitude 6.7 1994 Northridge Earthquake, I realized that the problem with LA is not the earthquakes, it’s the freeways – in fact, earthquakes are the best thing that LA has going for it. But the world values the excitement of cars burning petrol going nowhere fast except over the cliff of environmental destruction and fossil fuel decline.

The front page of last Saturday's Advertiser (14FEB2009) had this quote:  “At 5:15 PM on Saturday it was business as usual in sleepy Maryville. Most of the town’s 590 residents were locked inside their airconditioned homes watching TV to escape the heat. Thirty minutes later the town was gone.”

I wonder what airconditioned Hollywood fantasies they were watching?

A magnitude 5.4 earthquake an hour before would have jolted them into the awareness that they had physical bodies that live on the physical Earth -- and they would have left their houses in time to see and possibly escape the bushfires roaring towards them.

I first visited Newcastle, NSW, in January 1990, shortly after the 1989 Newcastle Earthquake that killed 13 people, "one of Australia's most serious natural disasters", when I accompanied an Australian seismologist to service the portable seismographs that he had deployed there to record aftershocks of the mainshock. Last July, 2008, I returned to Newcastle, the largest coal exporter in the world, to attend Climate Camp, and I was arrested for protesting the export of coal -- the largest producer of the green house gases (GHGs) responsible for global warming. I've never been arrested for protesting earthquakes.
 

Edward Cranswick
12 Bowillia Ave
Hawthorn, SA  5062
TEL: (08) 8271 1309
email: e_cranswick@yahoo.com