At night, when the ground shook at Marine Corps Base, Camp Pendleton, the tarantulas would come charging out of their holes in the ground, looking for trouble, often ending up in your boots. They came out often, because California averages between 100 - 150 “minor” earthquakes per day.
It’s not surprising, because it’s long been known that both insects and animal behavior can predict changes in the weather and earth conditions. Many of these behaviors are thought to be linked to changes in air pressure, humidity, temperature, and other environmental factors that humans might not be aware of. For example, you often see cows lying down before a storm, birds seeking shelter, your cat or dog hiding under the bed, ants moving to higher ground, frogs croaking loudly before a rain, and snakes lying on the warm roads before the onset of cold weather.
Tarantulas are very territorial and will fight to the death to protect their turf. I had read somewhere that they made good pets, so I caught a big one and brought it home to my kids in San Diego. It bit me, but it was only like a bee sting. My wife refused to let it be in the house; I didn’t have the heart to kill it, so I turned it loose in the back yard. The kids refused to play out there for weeks. Tarantulas are smart, however; if there’s a forest fire, they just burrow deeper into the ground.
It’s hard to image the wildfires that have brought such heartbreak, death, and economic ruin to the Los Angeles area in recent weeks. They are finally under control – the Palisades, Easton, Hurst, and Woodley wildfires that ravaged the area, burning tens of thousands of acres, destroying or damaging more than 12,000 structures, displacing thousands of residents and, tragically, killing at least 29 people.
Living within sight of the beach the twelve years I lived in San Diego and Long Beach, a suburb of Los Angeles, I always considered that I was “fireproof;” however, I see that the most recent wildfires have gutted the coastline, including trendy Malibu and Pacific Palisades. I don’t remember wildfires being a big issue there back in the 1960s and 70s; of course, I was usually overseas at sea and out of touch with what was going on back “in the world.” I do remember people getting upset every spring because the usually dry San Diego River flooded every year, and they wanted government relief because they had built their houses in its flood plain. Living there so long, I feel about San Diego like the Eagles felt about their song, “Hotel California:” “You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.”
I’ve had a little experience as a firefighter. In addition to graduating from two Navy firefighting schools, and countless shipboard drills, which are crucial because there’s no place to hide from a shipboard fire, I spent time when I was a teenager working for the Mississippi Forestry Commission, putting out woods’ fires all over Lamar County. Back in the 1950s, there were manned fire towers placed strategically all over the county. If smoke from a fire was sighted on the horizon, personnel in two or more towers would triangulate the location of the fire and radio the nearest truck-mounted firefighting crew to come and put it out. I was the junior member of such a two-man crew while still in high school. My job was to beat out the smaller flames while the senior guy isolated the fire by plowing a fire lane around it. The old guy had vertigo and didn’t particularly like driving the caterpillar on and off the truck, so he let me do it. I wasn’t old enough to have a driver’s license, so I guess I was an accident looking for a place to happen.
At the height of the wildfire’s progress last month, I heard a television commentator say that the “county was surrounded by a ring of fire.” I have no way of knowing what he knew, but there’s another “ring of fire” that is potentially more dangerous than any wildfire experienced by California and the entire West Coast to date, and that is the horseshoe-shaped belt of volcanos and earthquakes around the Pacific Ocean. It is the most seismically and volcanically active region in the entire world. That old joke about Southern California one day sliding off into the sea is not just fodder for apocalyptic movies (“2012”), etc.; in fact, sitting as it does on top of the San Andreas Fault, the U. S. Geological Survey Earthquake Rupture Forecast predicts there is a 75% probability that one or more 7.0 or greater magnitude earthquakes will strike the area in the next 30 years.
To put that into perspective, the earthquake that caused the Great San Francisco Fire of 1906, which essentially destroyed the city and killed over 3,000 people, registered 7.9 on the Monument Magnitude Scale (MMS). Closer to home, the New Madrid, Missouri, earthquake of February 1812, came in at a magnitude of an estimated 7.5 MMS, caused the Mississippi River to run backwards for several hours, and killed an unknown number of people.
Of course, I’ve always been a little dubious about “measurements.” I suppose one can believe the MMS, or the Richter Scale, which measures the same thing. On the other hand, I spent three years on a nuclear-powered ship and slept right above the after nuclear reactor. I had to wear a dosimeter to measure the amount of radiation (roentgens) I was exposed to each week. At each check, I was far beyond the limits, and I’m not dead yet; although, my wife says I do act a little “funny.” Also, the odometer on every used car I’ve ever bought was rolled back at least 30,000 miles – that’s just a given; and how many times have I made “Bs” in college when, at least in my opinion, I should have received an “A?” Liars figure and figures lie.
As you can see from the illustration, the volcanic ring of fire extends along the coasts of North and South America, across the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, and down through Japan into the Philippines and New Zealand. It features such active volcanos as Mt. St. Helens in Washington State, Kilauea in the Hawaiian Islands, Mt. Fuji in Japan, Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, and perhaps the most dangerous volcano in the world, Krakatoa, in Indonesia, which killed at least 33,000 when it erupted in 1883. Indonesia is also where Mt. Tambora erupted in 1815, resulting in the worldwide “Year Without Summer” because of the amount of volcanic ash that filled the atmosphere.
I’ve written here before about being in the shipyard at nearby Bremerton, Washington, when Mt. St. Helens erupted; how I’ve climbed Mt. Fuji twice during its peaceful periods, gasping for air in the high altitudes while being passed by little old Japanese grandmothers in tennis shoes, and how I happened to be there when Pinatubo erupted in 1991, essentially closing down Clark Air Force Base forever and speeding up our pull out of Naval Station, Subic Bay. During the Pinatubo eruption, which contaminated the air as far away as the United States, we saved the historic Catholic chapel at Subic by climbing on the roof and shoveling off the volcanic ash as fast as it fell. Dozens of other major buildings on the facility collapsed.
While many Hawaiian tourists of my generation never got farther than the Aloha Tower on Waikiki underneath Diamond Head’s dormant volcano, or past listening to the lounge singer, Don Ho, warbling “Tiny Bubbles” in the showroom of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the ecotourists of today are attracted to such active volcanic sites as Mauna Loa, Kilauea, and Hualalai, which are all located on the Big Island. Most fly over from Honolulu, but some take the Norwegian cruise ship, SS Pride of America, which was built in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and has the dubious distinction of being the last passenger ship constructed in the United States.
Having spent so many years in the Mediterranean, I’m also very familiar with the famous volcanos in that region, although they are outside the official ring of fire. Last week, I spoke to a group at OLLI (Osher Lifelong Living Institute) on the seven wonders of the ancient world, and one of the most significant ones I discussed was the Temple of Zeus on Mt. Olympus in Greece. Unfortunately, it was never an active volcano, but it was, at least in mythology, the home of Zeus, the father of the gods, who could smite those who crossed him with a stream of fire that would rival any flaming lahar flowing from one.
The ancient Greeks believed that volcanos and earthquakes were caused by Poseidon, the god of the seas and earthquakes. He was called the “earth shaker” because he supposedly struck the ground with his trident, causing tremors and destruction. All seven wonders of the ancient world, except the Great Pyramid at Giza, were destroyed by earthquakes, giving you some idea of the instability of the area. Earthquakes and volcanos are closely related because they both result from movements within the earth’s crust, where the tectonic plates rub together, overlap, or interact in other ways.
When you think about earthquakes and volcanos in the Mediterranean, you immediately think of Mt. Vesuvius overlooking the Bay of Naples and the unfortunate city of Pompeii which was destroyed by superheated lava and ash in 79 AD. Its most recent eruption was in 1944, and I would be very hesitant to live anywhere near it today because of its instability. The Roman admiral, Pliny the Elder, was killed trying to rescue some of the Pompeii victims as he sailed too close to the shore and succumbed to the toxic fumes.
Although the excavation of Pompeii, on the outskirts of Naples, is still ongoing, and some of the quality artifacts are in the J. Paul Getty Villa, a reproduction of a Roman house which is located in Pacific Palisades, California, which was seriously threatened by the recent wildfires, the most striking things I remember seeing there are the plaster of Paris molds of actual victims of the disaster, captured at their moment of death. Their bodies were covered with ash; it hardened; their flesh decayed over the years, leaving only the ash-covered shapes. In 1860, an Italian discovered that he could pump liquid plaster of Paris into the now hollow “molds,” remove the ash covering, and end up with lifelike depictions of the men, women, and children who died in the disaster. It’s quite sobering to see in person.
I can also remember steaming through the Strait of Messina at night and seeing Mt. Etna on the east coast of Sicily, glowing brightly as it spewed flames into the darkness. Even as I write this, Mt. Etna is blowing its top onto its snowy slopes. Etna, incidentally, is where Ulysses had to defeat the one-eyed Cyclopes, who made the weapons of the gods, before he could continue home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, at least according to Homer in the “Odyssey.”
There are some good things that come out of having a volcano in your back yard. For example, the Romans learned to mix the ash from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, which had destroyed Pompei, with lime and water and turn it into the earliest form of concrete. Their success with this formula can still be seen in such ancient structures in Rome as the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and some of the aqueducts. Some volcanos become tourist attractions such as Vesuvius in Italy, which is scary when you look down into its bubbling lava; Mt. St. Helens which included several unfortunate tourists among the 57 individuals killed when it erupted in 1980; and Mauna Loa on the Big Island in Hawaii which is the largest volcano on earth by volume. The ash distributed by ancient volcanos is also extremely fertile and valued by native farmers. They also create new land, leave valuable mineral deposits, produce geothermal energy, and reset ecosystems, allowing new species to thrive and adapt.
If wildfires and volcanos were not enough to worry about, we now must sweat asteroids. As of last week, it was announced that astronomers are closely monitoring asteroid 2024 YR4, which has the potential, roughly somewhere between 1% and 2%, of striking the earth on 22 December 2032. Relatively small, only 130 feet by 300 feet, but traveling about 36,000 miles an hour, it could strike the earth with the force of about 8 megatons of TNT, the equivalent of a medium-sized atom bomb, and lay waste to a major city. Agencies like NASA and the European Space Agency are developing plans to possibly deflect it. I’m thinking we should send Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis up to neutralize it like they did the one in the movie, “Armageddon” (1998). We do need to pay attention to this because, if you can believe the scientists, a similar occurrence is what wiped out the dinosaurs, although that asteroid was estimated to be 6-9 miles in diameter and killed about 75% of all life on earth when it struck the Yucatan about 66 million years ago.
Not to worry, but if you are camping in the desert and the tarantulas start running, beware. Also, keep your eyes on the sky: 2024 YR4 is coming - at 36,000 miles per hour.
Light a candle for me.
