Review of "Strong Motion"

Review of Strong Motion

Jonathan Franzen

Picador Press, 1992

I picked up this book after having read and enjoyed two of Franzen’s bestsellers: 2001’s The Corrections and 2010’s Freedom. These sprawling, ambitious critiques of post-modern American life have made Franzen a favorite of critics and fiction aficionados.  Generally, his novels drift from character to character, exploring their convoluted personal histories as they converge around a central conflict. More often than not, this conflict surfaces as a multi-generational corporate conspiracy. I am a big fan of his precise and descriptive prose, but it is too easy to despise his characters for their willful fallibility, self-interest, and inability to be decent to one another.

Before he was famous enough to snub Oprah’s book club (which he did, notoriously  in 2001), Franzen wrote a novel about earthquakes. Well, he wrote his usual novel, in which emotionally damaged individuals rattle in their dysfunctional families and unhealthy romances. But one of his main characters is a Harvard seismologist, and earthquakes persist throughout the book as metaphors and plot devices. 

Louis Holland is a cynical college graduate who, feeling detached from society, isolates himself in a mundane job and retreats to his working-class suburb of Boston. When an unexpected Massachusetts earthquake kills an eccentric grandmother, issues over her inheritance inject new conflict into his already neurotic family. Louis meets Renée Seitchek, a young Ph.D candidate at Harvard who is investigating the origin of the tremors. As their romance develops, so does a narrative about the corporate malfeasance that underlies the seismicity.

Sweeting-Aldren, a DuPont-like chemical company, sits squarely on top of the earthquake epicenters. Partly out of academic interest, partly out of meanness towards family members who own stock in the company, and begrudgingly out of a sense of justice, Louis and Renée begin an investigation of the company’s ability to rupture New England’s dormant faults. They discover that in the 60’s Sweeting-Aldren may have drilled a 25,000 foot-deep exploratory hole in a misguided search for deep petroleum reserves. There is also a mystery as to the location of thousands of gallons of the company’s toxic waste. If Sweeting-Aldren has been pumping their waste deep under-ground, they conjecture, then they could be inducing seismicity through high fluid pressures and lubrication of ancient fault structures.

Readers who approach this book out of an interest in geophysics will discover that 90% of the novel is dedicated to developing the characters and exploring their personal vulnerabilities.  However, if you like some existential musing with your seismology, it is well worth the read. Franzen is not a geophysicist, but his meticulous research makes the book convincing and elegant.  The subplot concerning induced seismicity seems feasible (at least to me), and the novel cites several real-world examples.  There was the famous 1960’s incident when the US Army pumped waste into an old borehole at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, outside Denver. Earthquakes ensued. When the Army stopped pumping, the earthquakes stopped.(see Hsieh and Bredehoeft’s 1981 paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research for more.) 

Part of what makes Franzen’s book worth reading now, twenty years after its publication, is the new relevance induced seismicity has for the geological community. Man-made reservoirs are known to be a source of earthquakes as the weight of dammed river forces pressurized water into faults. Reservoir-induced earthquakes may have caused hundreds in India and are a cause of concern over China’s Three Gorges Dam. Very recently, a geologist named Markus Haring was sued for inducing over 30 earthquakes while developing an enhanced geothermal project in Switzerland. Enhanced geothermal is basically similar to what happens in Strong Motion, without the toxicity- bedrock is fractured and pressurized water is injected at subsurface depths up to 5 km. The circulated water is turned into steam by heat and pressure, but unfortunately, this also tends to induce seismic activity. Hydraulic fracturing is also an important element of shale-gas extraction, and in the next few years we may see swarms of induced earthquakes showing up in Pennsylvania, New York, and Texas (some large earthquakes associated with shale gas drilling have already shaken Arkansas, in a story eerily similar to Franzen's.) 

I don’t know of any cases where real companies have induced earthquakes for such despicable reasons as Franzen’s fictional conglomerate, but the story is compelling. This is in large part due to the author’s ability to unpack the perceptions of geoscientists when natural disasters loom.

“By and large, the media and the public assumed that the research groups would issue urgent warnings if a cruncher appeared imminent; that this was what they’d come to Boston for. The groups themselves had no such plans. They were scientists and had come to gather information and advance their understanding of the earth. They knew, in any case, that the governor would never take the economically disruptive step of issuing an all-out warning unless most of the prediction methods agreed that a major shock was due. In the past, the methods had specifically not agreed about the timing, severity, and location of major earthquakes. This was why the methods were still being tested. When the groups said so, however, the public took it as modesty and continued to assume that somehow, should a disaster loom, a warning would be issued” (p. 248).

Few researchers, I think, would actually be so unconcerned about potential human suffering. However, this paragraph seems a neat little representation of the miscommunication that so often characterizes the exchange between experts and the public. Franzen also offers a cutting critique of the way that we tend to fetishize natural disasters:

 “And now the disaster which had been promising to make you feel that you lived in a special time, a real time, a time of the kind you read about in history books, a time of suffering and death and heroism … now a disaster of these historic proportions had come, and now you knew it wasn’t what you wanted either… because now you could see that the earthquake was neither history nor entertainment. It was simply an unusually awful mess” (p. 471).

This is a poignant reminder of the pain endured in very real earthquakes- such as the recent  Christchurch quake in New Zealand. I think there are few victims who would say they were ennobled by the experience. Acts of heroism and selflessness certainly took place and were vital in saving lives, but the look on everyone’s face says that they wish the quake had never happened.  

Liquefaction of the ground in New Brighton. Credit to Martin Luff.

Topical and carefully-written- I would recommend this book.

Earthquake in Christchurch

 News is still just reaching the Western hemisphere concerning the devastating 6.3-magnitude earthquake that struck the city of Christchurch, New Zealand early this morning. Though this event follows on the heels of September's larger, 7.1-magnitude event, this earthquake has been far more damaging. The death toll is already at 65 and is likely to rise as they uncover more of the deceased. Unreal images of destruction and suffering have already saturated the news.


You can donate to the victims through the Red Cross's New Zealand chapter.

Dear Old Hibernia

 A short while ago, I made the  trans-Atlantic flight to visit my girlfriend who was finishing her degree in the UK. As a break from the vivas and theses, we made a quick trip to the little exclave of Northern Ireland. The Emerald Isle is no less verdant and attractive on the Commonwealth side of the line, and the landscape abounds with geological curios. 


We followed the northern coast, where primeval-looking white washed cottages perch on the shoulders of big grassy hillsides. A short trip down this coastal highway will lead you to "The Giant's Causeway", a segment of coast honeycombed with columnar basalt that has become the most visited tourist site in Northern Ireland.

 

The rich-colored rocks form giant pillars in some places and have been worn down to a neat polygonal cobblestone pattern in others. The banner photo for this blog shows an example of the latter. This "columnar basalt" is the result of an ancient lava flow, where low-viscosity molten rock poured out into broad plains and plateaus. In the case of this site, the flood basalts stretched out for over 700,000 square miles during the Paleogene period  (50-60 mya.) As the lava quickly cooled, it contracted vertically, then horizontally, creating the regular network of fractures.

           (1768 engraving by Susanna Drury)

The Irish of years past must have agreed that the eroded pillars look like an oversized cobble-stone path. The etiological myth of the "Giant's Causeway" is built around the cultural hero Finn McCool (Fionn mac Cumhaill in the original Gaelic.) In legend, this giant hunter-warrior built the Giant's Causeway as a bridge to Scotland in order to keep his feet dry. In another version, he built the structure while preparing to attack a Scottish adversary, but then tore it up when he saw the size of his opponent. The geology behind this tall tale is not entirely baseless- the same basaltic plateau that we see in Ireland once stretched all the way across the Irish Sea and similar columnar basalts can be found at Fingal's Cave in Scotland.

The real "bridge to nowhere"

If Finn McCool's feet supposedly pounded natural wonders into the Emerald Isle, than his name lent symbolic power to its politics. The Fenian Brotherhood, formed by in 1858 by Irish emigrants to the US gave expression to anger and frustration at centuries of British colonial rule in their home country. Incensed by unfair land tenure and economic oppression, this  movement organized political support for Irish independence and even went so far as to invade forts in British-administered Canada. The idea of a few hundred 19th century Irish nationalists invading Canada seems quaint nowadays, but a quick trip to Belfast shows that the tensions are not that far behind us.

The industrial cities of Belfast and Derry are both littered with colorful murals, some pleading for peace- others with more sectarian aims.  

On the left is a mural in the bricked-in Catholic ghetto of Free Derry. The dove grows out of an oak leaf, a traditional symbol of the town. The frightening mural on the right stands on a Unionist stretch of the Shankill Road in Belfast. The caption reads "A Protestant wife defends the farm against intruders."The very day after our visit, a traditional celebration in a Unionist neighborhood went horribly wrong, with several police offers being injured by gunshots and rocks.

Imagine the earth six hundred million years ago. The Irish landmass was actually two separate islands, divided by the vast Iapetus Ocean. Northwestern Ireland balanced on a microplate grouped with Laurentia while southern Ireland (along with the mass of England) belonged to the smaller Avalonia continent.

Map courtesy of Wikiuser Woudloper. The red lines represent sutures and orogenies.

It took 50 million years, but tectonic engines brought these disparate parts crashing together in a fateful union. Ireland has been one island since. How much longer will it take for the residents to realize that today's partition is only in their minds?

Courtesy of NASA.