Quake News from America Roger Bilham Savours Two Rich Accounts of Seismicity Across the Continent

SEISMOLOGY Quake news from America Roger Bilham savours two rich accounts of seismicity across the continent. iven recent seismic activity — Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next years, coinciding with a rise in fracking, political as well as geological — it’s Devastating Earthquake was unlikely to represent a natural process. perhaps unsurprising that two books KATHRYN MILES Miles does not take sides, but it’s difficult Gon earthquakes have arrived this season. Dutton: 2017. for the reader not to. One is as elegant as the score of a Beethoven The Great Quake: How the Biggest She visits New York City, marvelling at symphony; the other resembles a diary of Earthquake in North America Changed Our subway tunnels and unreinforced masonry MICHAEL NICHOLS/NGC conversations overheard during a rock con- Understanding of the Planet almost certainly scheduled for destruction by cert. Both are interesting, and both relate HENRY FOUNTAIN the next moderate earthquake in the vicin- Crown: 2017. recent history to a shaky future. ity. She considers the perils of nuclear-waste Journalist Kathryn Miles’s Quakeland is a storage in Nevada and Texas, and ponders litany of bad things that happen when you personalities, opinions and prejudices tell a the risks to Idaho miners of rock bursts — provoke Earth to release its invisible but story of scientific discovery and engineering spontaneous fracture of the working face ubiquitous store of seismic-strain energy, remedy. when the restraints of many million years of either by removing fluids (oil, water, gas) or Miles poses some important societal confinement are mined away. She contem- by adding them in copious quantities (when questions. Aside from human intervention plates the ups and downs of the Yellowstone extracting shale gas in hydraulic fracturing, potentially triggering a really damaging Caldera — North America’s very own mid- also known as fracking, or when injecting earthquake, what is it actually like to live continent supervolcano — and its magnifi- contaminated water or building reservoirs). in neighbourhoods jolted daily by mag- cently uncertain future. Miles also touches To complete the picture, she describes at nitude 1–3 earthquakes, or the occasional on geothermal power plants in southern length the bad things that happen dur- magnitude 5? Are these bumps in the night California’s Salton Sea and elsewhere; the vast ing unprovoked natural earthquakes. As acceptable? And how can industries that US network of crum- its subtitle hints, the book takes the form perturb the highly stressed rocks beneath bling bridges, dams NATURE.COM of a road trip to visit seismic disasters our feet deny obvious cause and effect? In and oil-storage farms; For more on science both past and potential, and seismologists 2015, the Oklahoma Geological Survey and the magnitude in culture see: and earthquake engineers who have first- conceded that a quadrupling of the rate of 7–9 earthquakes that nature.com/ hand knowledge of them. Their colourful magnitude-3 or more earthquakes in recent could hit California booksandarts 278 | NATURE | VOL 548 | 17 AUGUST©20 120177 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. ©2017 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT Books in brief MOOCs and Their Afterlives Edited by Elizabeth Losh UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS (2017) Whither MOOCs — the massive open online courses that promised to vastly scale up access to higher education? This multi-author volume reveals a bumpy evolution, from wrangles over “educational monoculture” to the emergence of spin-offs such as POOCs (participatory open online courses). Media theorist Elizabeth Losh is typically insightful. She argues that if we forget the long US tradition of open learning through efforts such as the Chautauqua adult- education movement and the Tuskegee Institute Movable School, we are likely to “romanticize novelty” and cramp innovation. Planet Hunters: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life Lucas Ellerbroek (Translated by Andy Brown) REAKTION (2017) In this delightful scientific chronicle of humanity’s quest for “other worlds”, astronomer Lucas Ellerbroek mixes memoir, history and meetings with remarkable planet hunters. The field’s roots are speculative: mathematician Christiaan Huygens’s 1698 best-seller Cosmotheoros, for instance, posited intelligent extraterrestrial life. A geyser in Yellowstone Over the past century, with chemists and biologists joining in, National Park, much emerging stars such as William Borucki and Sara Seager have of which sits in the contributed to an inspiring haul of more than 3,000 exoplanets so far. seismically active caldera of a volcano. Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present and the Cascadia coastline of Oregon and Steven Lubar HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS (2017) Washington state this century. Amid all this Far from being cases of ‘stuff’, museums are gestalts — complete doom, a new elementary school on the coast entities that capture and contextualize the past. Here, former curator near Westport, Washington, vulnerable to Steven Lubar examines the institutions through the lens of Brown inbound tsunamis, is offered as a note of University’s Jenks Museum in Providence, Rhode Island: set up in optimism. With foresight and much persua- 1871 by naturalist John Whipple Potter Jenks, its collections were sion from its head teacher, it was engineered summarily dumped in 1945. Lubar (who is involved in a project to to become an elevated safe haven. reimagine the Jenks; https://jenksmuseum.org) elucidates what we Miles briefly discusses earthquake predic- lose through such erosion of material culture, from repositories of tion and the perils of getting it wrong (embar- shared histories to ‘object libraries’ for generations of researchers. rassment in New Madrid, Missouri, where a quake was predicted but never mat erialized; prison in L’Aquila, Italy, where scientists Traces of Vermeer failed to foresee a devastating seismic event) Jane Jelley OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS (2017) and the successes of early-warning systems, The exquisitely luminous paintings of Johannes Vermeer have with which electronic alerts can be issued long stirred debate over whether the seventeenth-century Dutch ahead of damaging seismic waves. Yes, it’s master used optical aids. Artist Jane Jelley probed the issue a lot to digest, but most of the book obeys pragmatically. Before assessing any use of camera obscura, she the laws of physics, and it is a engaging read. investigates the tools, materials and studio Vermeer was known to One just can’t help wishing that Miles’s road have used, and his virtuosic layering of paint. She concludes that he trips had taken her somewhere that wasn’t a probably embraced close-up and distance observation, perspective disaster waiting to happen. drawings and lenses. But artists, she notes, have always made use of In The Great Quake, journalist Henry technology — and that does not, in Vermeer’s case, diminish genius. Fountain provides us with a forthright and timely reminder of the startling historical consequences of North America’s largest The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn known earthquake, which more than half Margaret Willes YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS (2017) a century ago devastated southern Alaska. Worldly civil servant Samuel Pepys and pious arboriculturalist With its epicentre in Prince William Sound, John Evelyn were unlikely friends. Yet the diarists, as the “two great the 1964 quake reached magnitude 9.2, the recorders of Restoration England”, were both intensely curious about second largest in the global instrumental science, reminds Margaret Willes in this portrait of the era. Evelyn record. It released more energy than either authored the pioneering 1664 forestry manual Sylva (see G. Hemery the 2004 Sumatra–Andaman earthquake Nature 507, 166–167; 2014); Pepys was a scientific-instrument fan. or the 2011 Tohoku earthquake off Japan; And as stalwarts of the Royal Society — Evelyn as co-founder, Pepys and it generated almost as many pages of as president — they both helped to ensure its survival. Barbara Kiser ©2017 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. ©2017 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri g17hts rAUGUSTeserved. 2017 | VOL 548 | NATURE | 279 COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS BILL RAY/THE LIFE PICTURE COLL./GETTY LIFE PICTURE BILL RAY/THE Catastrophic damage in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1964, caused by the second-largest earthquake in the global instrumental record. scientific commentary and description geologist George Plafker, who pains takingly and larger populations, the death toll and as aftershocks. Yet it has been forgotten by mapped the height reached by barnacles price tag would be two orders of magnitude many. lifted out of the intertidal zone along shore- larger than the 139 fatalities and US$300- The quake was scientifically important lines raised by the earthquake, and docu- million economic cost recorded in 1964. because it occurred at a time when plate mented the depths of drowned forests. He What is clear from these two books is that tectonics was in transition from hypoth- deduced that the region of subsidence was seismicity on the North American continent esis to theory. Fountain expertly traces the the surface manifestation of previously is guaranteed to deliver surprises, along with theory’s historical development, and how compressed rocks unprecedented economic and human losses. the Alaska earthquake was pivotal in nailing springing apart, “Previous Previous earthquakes provide clear guidance down one of the most important predic- driving parts of earthquakes about the present-day vulnerability of US tions. The earthquake caused a fjordland Alaska up and provide clear infrastructure and populations. Engineers region larger than England to subside, and southwards over guidance about and seismologists know how to mitigate the a similarly huge region of islands offshore the Pacific Plate. effects of future earthquakes (and, in mid- to rise by many metres; but its scientific His finding con- present-day continent, would advise against the reckless implications were not obvious at the time.

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