Continental drift and 9/11

Edward Cranswick   11SEP2006

On 08 Sep 2001, I left New York on the train, and I arrived back at my office at the National Earthquake Information Center of the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Golden, Colorado, on 12 Sep 2001 -- I was in Milwaukee on 9/11. Seeing the collapse of the Twin Towers on television, my first response was not shock but rather the feeling that the event was inevitable.

Earthquakes are an inevitable consequence of continental drift or, more specifically, plate tectonics. We cannot predict the precise size & time & place of earthquakes; instead, like the weather, we make forecasts of the probability of their occurrence  -- but after a significant earthquake, seismologists are prone to explain in detail how & why they expected it to happen. The surface of the Earth is broken up into about ten large, more or less rigid, tectonic plates which move slowly (several cm/year) around the Earth, and most large earthquakes occur where the plates touch and rub against each other. As the continents drift, i.e., as the respective masses of two plates slowly move relative to one other, the fault or contact zone between them stays locked because of frictional resistance -- the fault sticks -- and the edges of the plates elastically deform like enormous springs, and the stress builds up over periods of decades. Inevitably the stress reaches the breaking point, and rocks on opposite sides of the fault suddenly, within seconds, slide several meters past each other -- the fault slips -- and this  generates the seismic waves which cause the earthquake, the ground shaking. This slip reduces the stress, the fault sticks again, and then the stick/slip cycle of earthquake generation is repeated.

For most of the day after the attack, I and the other passengers were isolated from news as our train drove across the American Midwest from Chicago to Denver. But on arrival at my US government office, I was bombarded by all the post-9/11 Bush propaganda, and I became furious at my government. Since 1974, my principal job in seismology was to chase large earthquakes -- deploy portable seismographs in the epicentral area to record aftershocks and use those records to understand the causes of the mainshock and the pattern of damage it produced (I used to liken my job to that of the fire brigade, but my first wife retorted that the the fire brigade put out fires but I just took pictures of the buildings burning down). Though I have never directly experienced a very destructive earthquake, I have spent some time working in and around the damage produced by catastrophic earthquakes. Seeing the images of the collapse of the Twin Towers triggered my earthquake response and put me into the seismomanic state in which I became focused on finding the causes and effects of this event. However, in this case, I had no source of data from portable seismographs in the field -- instead, I had a diversity of stories from the Internet.

The following week, at a post-9/11 briefing for USGS employees, we were informed that the Chief Scientist of our office had been on the Afghanistan border two weeks before the 9/11 attack. This was one of the first distinct post-9/11 pieces of information I had about US policy and the activities of my Federal agency and, at the time, it made no sense to me. Roughly a fortnight after that, one of our senior scientists who had formerly been head of the national earthquake program was host to three visitors from Uzbekistan, and he had satellite photographs of Uzbekistan at the same time that the Pentagon had purchased and thereby restricted access to all available satellite photographs of Afghanistan and vicinity. Following the US invasion of Afghanistan on 07 Oct 2001, I was trying to understand -- if five of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers had been from Egypt and the rest from Saudi Arabia -- why had we invaded Afghanistan?

On 26 Oct 2001, based on six weeks of  Internet research, I had a revelation about the obvious which I explained in an email the following day: "Why are we bombing Afghanistan? We are bombing Afghanistan to beat it into submission so that we can build oil and gas pipelines through it that will give us access to the untapped petroleum reserves of Central Asia and thus circumvent OPEC that is dominated by Islamic nations." A pipeline through Afghanistan, one of the most seismically active areas on Earth, would be subject to earthquake hazards in addition to those posed by mujahideen equipped with Soviet RPGs -- this explained why our Chief Scientist was on the Afghanistan border before 9/11 and it implied that we had some secret contracts with some US military/intelligence organizations. Given this affiliation and the increasing secrecy, militarization, and corruption of the Federal government, I decided I could no longer work in the USGS, could not deal with Bush being my boss anymore, and within about fortnight I  initiated a process for an early retirement -- it was an amicable divorce, they didn't want me around asking questions.

My last day of work was 01 Feb 2002, and the day before, I gave my last talk at the USGS: "Earthquakes and the Impulse Response of the Soul". I started by using a crude model of the Twin Towers to demonstrate earthquake damage to buildings, and I implied that its destruction was the result of analogously similar inevitable processes. There is a correspondence between peoples and plates -- peoples move between continents where continents border each other, where they touch, and this is where the plates touch -- where there are earthquakes, there is human conflict. The plates move around the surface of the Earth supported by the underlying hot, fluid asthenosphere, and similarly, the countries move through the industrial civilization supported by petroleum.

The seismomania induced by 9/11 lasted for about a year and a half -- when it was over I found that I had left my job, my career, my country, my continent, and gone to Iraq and returned to Australia, the mother land, and was here wondering what to do while I waited for the next events ... peak oil and global warming ...