University of Hawaii, on the Big Island
“You talk about power? I’ll tell you about power.”
Dr. Robert Hamilton stood at the front of the lecture hall. He had momentarily forgotten about the phone call he’d received before class — from his oncologist. Instead, he was now in the happy oblivion of his favorite class: introduction to geology.
The students gazed numbly into the distance or doodled in their notebooks. Dr. Hamilton paced around the podium, his eyes glued to the floor, as if he were lecturing to no one but himself.
“And I’m not referring to nuclear fission. The physicists can tell you about that. I’m talking about something else altogether.” He clicked a button on the video control. The big screen lit up behind him and showed a photo of Mount St. Helens exploding. “Look at that volcanic plume,” he said, “that column of ash, gas, and pumice fragments reaching high into the atmosphere!”
After gazing at it for a moment, Hamilton wheeled around and continued, “The volcano in Iceland in 2010 paralyzed air travel around the world. And now consider this year’s record number of eruptions, more than any time in recorded human history. I was at the Saudi Arabian site recently, just after an eruption at Harrat-Ithnayn out in the western desert, which reminds me …”
He pulled out a sheet of paper and scanned it. “What number is that … the map … oh, yes, here it is.” He pushed that number on his control. A world map appeared on the screen. Small colored circles dotted parts of Asia, India, and the Middle East. “Look at the circles — areas where it is estimated that the most volcanic activity, with the highest fatalities, is predicted to occur. Some of this data is from the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Now, here’s something interesting …” Hamilton took his laser pointer and put a red dot on the circles in the Middle East, running from Turkey in the north, through Syria, through Israel, and down to Cairo. “Look at this … this is ground zero for the most massive volcanic activity … right here.”
He stopped and looked out at the class as if suddenly remembering where he was. “But I was talking about power, wasn’t I?” His gaze was met by a sea of vacant stares, but something else caught his eye … an unfamiliar face, someone out of place. In the very last row sat a middle-aged man in a short-sleeve white shirt and a tie, which was loose at the neck.
Hamilton refocused on his lecture. “Power. Yes. Volcanoes and earthquakes are intimately related. They can cause tsunamis at sea …” He noticed a hand go up from a student. At last, he thought, someone was awake; Hamilton nodded for him to ask his question.
“Can a tsunami swallow up a ship out in the sea, like an ocean liner or something like that?”
“The simple answer is no,” Hamilton replied. “Because of the geophysics of the tsunami wave. In open ocean the depth of the seafloor keeps the wave down to a short height but spreading it over a huge distance in its length so it’s hardly noticeable. But when the surge of water hits a shallow sea floor, as you have when you approach the shallows of a harbor, that’s when the top of the wave mounds up over the bottom part, and you have wave shoaling. Creating a wall of water. In fact, the word tsumani is a Japanese word, meaning ‘harbor wave.’ ”
Another student’s hand shot up. “The textbook showed pictures from the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami back in 2011. The waves didn’t seem that tall.”
Hamilton smiled at the sudden interest. “They didn’t have to be, yet they created widespread damage. On the other hand, geological events can create colossal tidal waves. Volcanic eruptions. Earthquakes. And those in turn can cause monster walls of water. In 1958 in Lituya Bay in Alaska a landslide created a tidal wave that was seventeen hundred feet high.”
The classroom exploded with a chorus of disbelief. Professor Hamilton was energized.
“Students, that’s what I am talking about when I talk about the raw power of physical events in the earth. The 9.0 earthquake in Japan actually accelerated the earth’s rotation slightly. Take another comparison. Take a mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion. The bombs tested in the Nevada desert in the 1950s sent mushroom clouds about seven miles into the sky. Compare that with Mount St. Helens, whose plume reached fifteen miles high.
“Volcanoes can spit out pyroclastic flows at fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, full of rock, hot ash, and gas. The movement of these flows has been clocked at a hundred and fifty miles per hour, mudslides at forty miles per hour, searing hot lava flows at thirty miles per hour. The effects of a volcano can cover up to eight hundred thousand square miles, like the one at Krakatoa, Indonesia, in 1883. And a volcano can fire off natural bombs called tephra — huge pieces of rock propelled outward in a diameter of up to fifty miles. Can you imagine one-ton boulders being flung into the air for miles? Then there are the other effects: disruption of electronic transmissions, clogging the jet engines of aircraft, jammed radio and television signals. When you’re in the middle of one of these, it’s the closest thing imaginable to the end of the world. That’s what the survivors of the ancient eruption at Vesuvius must have thought. They must have wept and declared that their gods had betrayed them.”
Having exhausted his tangent, Hamilton returned to his prepared lesson, about the basics of tectonic plates.
Soon the bell rang, and Hamilton gathered up his notes. That’s when, in the quiet of the classroom, the phone call from the oncologist came rushing back into his mind. “Some spots lit up on your last scan,” the doctor had said. “We need you to come in so we can discuss some options. I’m sorry, Dr. Hamilton.”
As Hamilton was deep in thought, the man from the back of the room slowly sauntered down the aisle. He seemed to be timing his gait to give a few straggling students a chance to clear the room. When the lecture hall was empty, the man approached Dr. Hamilton. The middle-aged man had a tangle of uncombed hair and an intense look to him.
“Professor Hamilton,” the man said, looking around as if he were afraid of being overheard. “I’m Curtis Belltether. Remember me?”
Hamilton gave a vague shake of the head.
“I’m the blog journalist. I called you about your studies …”
“Oh, yes. Right. Were we supposed to meet?”
“Not really. I flew here on a bit of a whim. I thought we should talk face-to-face.”
“Tell me about yourself again, Mr. Belltether. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten.”
“I used to be a reporter for a couple of major print dailies. They went belly up, so I transferred over to some Internet publications. I kept a job, for a while. My specialty is investigative reporting, but with the changes in the electronic media, with foreign interests buying everything up, and then with the political controls that Washington has placed on the Internet, I found myself … oh, you might say, rubbing the cat’s fur the wrong way. I’m your all-purpose offender. So, finding myself out of work, I started my own Internet news source. My first site was called NewsJunk. That got shut down. Too controversial. Then I launched one called the Barn Door. That one apparently stepped on some toes as well. My Internet provider and the telecom company said my site was shut down because it had too many viruses. What a laugh. I had a cyber expert examine my site. Guess what? No viruses … Am I boring you?”
Hamilton’s expression brightened. “No, go on.”
“So now my blog site is called Leak-o-paedia. I expose secret conspiracies and government corruption based on information that people … like you … give me.”
“Like me?”
“Yeah. Just like you. Experts who’ve had some time in the belly of the beast and have a story to tell.”
“What beast?”
“How about the International Conference on Climate and Global Warming at the United Nations?”
“They rejected my credentials. I wasn’t allowed in.”
“What is it you want, Mr. Belltether?”
“Your take on the recent spike in worldwide temperatures, the U.N. conference, and what you tried to tell Washington but what they didn’t want to hear … that sort of thing.”
Dr. Hamilton was smiling. For a brief moment that phone call from his doctor had just been tucked away in the out basket.