A short history of nearly everything (30 page)

How and when the Earth got its crust are questions that divide geologists into two broad camps—those who think it happened abruptly early in the Earth’s history and those who think it happened gradually and rather later. Strength of feeling runs deep on such matters. Richard Armstrong of Yale proposed an early-burst theory in the 1960s, then spent the rest of his career fighting those who did not agree with him. He died of cancer in 1991, but shortly before his death he “lashed out at his critics in a polemic in an Australian earth science journal that charged them with perpetuating myths,” according to a report inEarthmagazine in 1998. “He died a bitter man,” reported a colleague.

The crust and part of the outer mantle together are called the lithosphere (from the Greeklithos , meaning “stone”), which in turn floats on top of a layer of softer rock called the asthenosphere (from Greek words meaning “without strength”), but such terms are never entirely satisfactory. To say that the lithosphere floats on top of the asthenosphere suggests a degree of easy buoyancy that isn’t quite right. Similarly it is misleading to think of the rocks as flowing in anything like the way we think of materials flowing on the surface. The rocks are viscous, but only in the same way that glass is. It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downward under the relentless drag of gravity. Remove a pane of really old glass from the window of a European cathedral and it will be noticeably thicker at the bottom than at the top. That is the sort of “flow” we are talking about. The hour hand on a clock moves about ten thousand times faster than the “flowing” rocks of the mantle.

The movements occur not just laterally as the Earth’s plates move across the surface, but up and down as well, as rocks rise and fall under the churning process known as convection. Convection as a process was first deduced by the eccentric Count von Rumford at the end of the eighteenth century. Sixty years later an English vicar named Osmond Fisher presciently suggested that the Earth’s interior might well be fluid enough for the contents to move about, but that idea took a very long time to gain support.

In about 1970, when geophysicists realized just how much turmoil was going on down there, it came as a considerable shock. As Shawna Vogel put it in the bookNaked Earth: The New Geophysics : “It was as if scientists had spent decades figuring out the layers of the Earth’s atmosphere—troposphere, stratosphere, and so forth—and then had suddenly found out about wind.”

How deep the convection process goes has been a matter of controversy ever since. Some say it begins four hundred miles down, others two thousand miles below us. The problem, as Donald Trefil has observed, is that “there are two sets of data, from two different disciplines, that cannot be reconciled.” Geochemists say that certain elements on Earth’s surface cannot have come from the upper mantle, but must have come from deeper within the Earth. Therefore the materials in the upper and lower mantle must at least occasionally mix. Seismologists insist that there is no evidence to support such a thesis.

So all that can be said is that at some slightly indeterminate point as we head toward the center of Earth we leave the asthenosphere and plunge into pure mantle. Considering that it accounts for 82 percent of the Earth’s volume and 65 percent of its mass, the mantle doesn’t attract a great deal of attention, largely because the things that interest Earth scientists and general readers alike happen either deeper down (as with magnetism) or nearer the surface (as with earthquakes). We know that to a depth of about a hundred miles the mantle consists predominantly of a type of rock known as peridotite, but what fills the space beyond is uncertain. According to aNature report, it seems not to be peridotite. More than this we do not know.

Beneath the mantle are the two cores—a solid inner core and a liquid outer one. Needless to say, our understanding of the nature of these cores is indirect, but scientists can make some reasonable assumptions. They know that the pressures at the center of the Earth are sufficiently high—something over three million times those found at the surface—to turn any rock there solid. They also know from Earth’s history (among other clues) that the inner core is very good at retaining its heat. Although it is little more than a guess, it is thought that in over four billion years the temperature at the core has fallen by no more than 200°F. No one knows exactly how hot the Earth’s core is, but estimates range from something over 7,000°F to 13,000°F—about as hot as the surface of the Sun.

The outer core is in many ways even less well understood, though everyone is in agreement that it is fluid and that it is the seat of magnetism. The theory was put forward by E. C. Bullard of Cambridge University in 1949 that this fluid part of the Earth’s core revolves in a way that makes it, in effect, an electrical motor, creating the Earth’s magnetic field. The assumption is that the convecting fluids in the Earth act somehow like the currents in wires. Exactly what happens isn’t known, but it is felt pretty certain that it is connected with the core spinning and with its being liquid. Bodies that don’t have a liquid core—the Moon and Mars, for instance—don’t have magnetism.

We know that Earth’s magnetic field changes in power from time to time: during the age of the dinosaurs, it was up to three times as strong as now. We also know that it reverses itself every 500,000 years or so on average, though that average hides a huge degree of unpredictability. The last reversal was about 750,000 years ago. Sometimes it stays put for millions of years—37 million years appears to be the longest stretch—and at other times it has reversed after as little as 20,000 years. Altogether in the last 100 million years it has reversed itself about two hundred times, and we don’t have any real idea why. It has been called “the greatest unanswered question in the geological sciences.”

We may be going through a reversal now. The Earth’s magnetic field has diminished by perhaps as much as 6 percent in the last century alone. Any diminution in magnetism is likely to be bad news, because magnetism, apart from holding notes to refrigerators and keeping our compasses pointing the right way, plays a vital role in keeping us alive. Space is full of dangerous cosmic rays that in the absence of magnetic protection would tear through our bodies, leaving much of our DNA in useless tatters. When the magnetic field is working, these rays are safely herded away from the Earth’s surface and into two zones in near space called the Van Allen belts. They also interact with particles in the upper atmosphere to create the bewitching veils of light known as the auroras.

A big part of the reason for our ignorance, interestingly enough, is that traditionally there has been little effort to coordinate what’s happening on top of the Earth with what’s going on inside. According to Shawna Vogel: “Geologists and geophysicists rarely go to the same meetings or collaborate on the same problems.”

Perhaps nothing better demonstrates our inadequate grasp of the dynamics of the Earth’s interior than how badly we are caught out when it acts up, and it would be hard to come up with a more salutary reminder of the limitations of our understanding than the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington in 1980.

At that time, the lower forty-eight United States had not seen a volcanic eruption for over sixty-five years. Therefore the government volcanologists called in to monitor and forecast St. Helens’s behavior primarily had seen only Hawaiian volcanoes in action, and they, it turned out, were not the same thing at all.

St. Helens started its ominous rumblings on March 20. Within a week it was erupting magma, albeit in modest amounts, up to a hundred times a day, and being constantly shaken with earthquakes. People were evacuated to what was assumed to be a safe distance of eight miles. As the mountain’s rumblings grew St. Helens became a tourist attraction for the world. Newspapers gave daily reports on the best places to get a view. Television crews repeatedly flew in helicopters to the summit, and people were even seen climbing over the mountain. On one day, more than seventy copters and light aircraft circled the summit. But as the days passed and the rumblings failed to develop into anything dramatic, people grew restless, and the view became general that the volcano wasn’t going to blow after all.

On April 19 the northern flank of the mountain began to bulge conspicuously. Remarkably, no one in a position of responsibility saw that this strongly signaled a lateral blast. The seismologists resolutely based their conclusions on the behavior of Hawaiian volcanoes, which don’t blow out sideways. Almost the only person who believed that something really bad might happen was Jack Hyde, a geology professor at a community college in Tacoma. He pointed out that St. Helens didn’t have an open vent, as Hawaiian volcanoes have, so any pressure building up inside was bound to be released dramatically and probably catastrophically. However, Hyde was not part of the official team and his observations attracted little notice.

We all know what happened next. At 8:32A.M. on a Sunday morning, May 18, the north side of the volcano collapsed, sending an enormous avalanche of dirt and rock rushing down the mountain slope at 150 miles an hour. It was the biggest landslide in human history and carried enough material to bury the whole of Manhattan to a depth of four hundred feet. A minute later, its flank severely weakened, St. Helens exploded with the force of five hundred Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, shooting out a murderous hot cloud at up to 650 miles an hour—much too fast, clearly, for anyone nearby to outrace. Many people who were thought to be in safe areas, often far out of sight of the volcano, were overtaken. Fifty-seven people were killed. Twenty-three of the bodies were never found. The toll would have been much higher except that it was a Sunday. Had it been a weekday many lumber workers would have been working within the death zone. As it was, people were killed eighteen miles away.

The luckiest person on that day was a graduate student named Harry Glicken. He had been manning an observation post 5.7 miles from the mountain, but he had a college placement interview on May 18 in California, and so had left the site the day before the eruption. His place was taken by David Johnston. Johnston was the first to report the volcano exploding; moments later he was dead. His body was never found. Glicken’s luck, alas, was temporary. Eleven years later he was one of forty-three scientists and journalists fatally caught up in a lethal outpouring of superheated ash, gases, and molten rock—what is known as a pyroclastic flow—at Mount Unzen in Japan when yet another volcano was catastrophically misread.

Volcanologists may or may not be the worst scientists in the world at making predictions, but they are without question the worst in the world at realizing how bad their predictions are. Less than two years after the Unzen catastrophe another group of volcano watchers, led by Stanley Williams of the University of Arizona, descended into the rim of an active volcano called Galeras in Colombia. Despite the deaths of recent years, only two of the sixteen members of Williams’s party wore safety helmets or other protective gear. The volcano erupted, killing six of the scientists, along with three tourists who had followed them, and seriously injuring several others, including Williams himself.

In an extraordinarily unself-critical book calledSurviving Galeras , Williams said he could “only shake my head in wonder” when he learned afterward that his colleagues in the world of volcanology had suggested that he had overlooked or disregarded important seismic signals and behaved recklessly. “How easy it is to snipe after the fact, to apply the knowledge we have now to the events of 1993,” he wrote. He was guilty of nothing worse, he believed, than unlucky timing when Galeras “behaved capriciously, as natural forces are wont to do. I was fooled, and for that I will take responsibility. But I do not feel guilty about the deaths of my colleagues. There is no guilt. There was only an eruption.”

But to return to Washington. Mount St. Helens lost thirteen hundred feet of peak, and 230 square miles of forest were devastated. Enough trees to build 150,000 homes (or 300,000 in some reports) were blown away. The damage was placed at $2.7 billion. A giant column of smoke and ash rose to a height of sixty thousand feet in less than ten minutes. An airliner some thirty miles away reported being pelted with rocks.

Ninety minutes after the blast, ash began to rain down on Yakima, Washington, a community of fifty thousand people about eighty miles away. As you would expect, the ash turned day to night and got into everything, clogging motors, generators, and electrical switching equipment, choking pedestrians, blocking filtration systems, and generally bringing things to a halt. The airport shut down and highways in and out of the city were closed.

All this was happening, you will note, just downwind of a volcano that had been rumbling menacingly for two months. Yet Yakima had no volcano emergency procedures. The city’s emergency broadcast system, which was supposed to swing into action during a crisis, did not go on the air because “the Sunday-morning staff did not know how to operate the equipment.” For three days, Yakima was paralyzed and cut off from the world, its airport closed, its approach roads impassable. Altogether the city received just five-eighths of an inch of ash after the eruption of Mount St. Helens. Now bear that in mind, please, as we consider what a Yellowstone blast would do.

IN THE 1960s, while studying the volcanic history of Yellowstone National Park, Bob Christiansen of the United States Geological Survey became puzzled about something that, oddly, had not troubled anyone before: he couldn’t find the park’s volcano. It had been known for a long time that Yellowstone was volcanic in nature—that’s what accounted for all its geysers and other steamy features—and the one thing about volcanoes is that they are generally pretty conspicuous. But Christiansen couldn’t find the Yellowstone volcano anywhere. In particular what he couldn’t find was a structure known as a caldera.

Most of us, when we think of volcanoes, think of the classic cone shapes of a Fuji or Kilimanjaro, which are created when erupting magma accumulates in a symmetrical mound. These can form remarkably quickly. In 1943, at Parícutin in Mexico, a farmer was startled to see smoke rising from a patch on his land. In one week he was the bemused owner of a cone five hundred feet high. Within two years it had topped out at almost fourteen hundred feet and was more than half a mile across. Altogether there are some ten thousand of these intrusively visible volcanoes on Earth, all but a few hundred of them extinct. But there is a second, less celebrated type of volcano that doesn’t involve mountain building. These are volcanoes so explosive that they burst open in a single mighty rupture, leaving behind a vast subsided pit, the caldera (from a Latin word for cauldron). Yellowstone obviously was of this second type, but Christiansen couldn’t find the caldera anywhere.