Atkins saw the lightly shaded patch on the ground before anyone else. Shaped like a funnel, the tapered end curved toward the river.
“Is that it?” he asked, stunned. The sand blow was immense.
Jacobs nodded. “There’s so much sand down there they call it ‘the beach.’”
A rural road stopped abruptly at the edge of the area and veered around it at a sharp right angle.
“It’s a mile and a half long,” Jacobs said. “And about a half mile wide. The ground’s littered with debris from the quake—fragments of coal, lignite, charcoal. When that one blew, it must have sounded like someone had opened a pipe straight to hell.”
Atkins didn’t doubt it and tried to imagine what it must have looked like when the ground started to erupt and boil. Something out of
“Hang on. We’re going to climb,” Jacobs announced to the geologists, whose eyes were riveted on the ground. The helicopter shot up like an elevator, leveling off again at about four thousand feet.
Atkins saw it first, but he’d been looking for it. Jacobs had tipped him off earlier. The famous Boot Heel Lineament. The largest visible surface feature left by the three quakes of the early 1800s. A faint line that ran like a reddish-brown ribbon about eighty miles across the Missouri boot heel. The name came from the shape of the small wedge of extreme southeast Missouri that dipped into Arkansas.
“No one knew about it until 1988, when a grad student was studying some satellite photographs. Jumped right out at him. We still don’t know much about how it was formed. The best explanation is that it somehow reflects the actual fault deep below it.”
“What’s the tower off to the left?” Atkins said, almost shouting to make himself heard over the droning chop of the rotors.
“Power plant, one of the biggest in Missouri,” Jacobs said. The smokestack was belching puffs of white smoke across the pink horizon.
Atkins started to say something. Jacobs grinned. “I know. The lineament runs right beneath it. I’d call that poor planning.”
“Any nuclear plants around here?” Atkins asked.
“Nothing in the immediate fault zone,” Jacobs said. “But if you move a couple hundred miles east, the TVA’s got two nuclear plants on-line. Sequoyah and Watts Bar. Both are over near Chattanooga.”
Atkins didn’t even want to consider the problems a nuclear reactor would present in a powerful earthquake. So far, that had never happened anywhere in the world. But it was only a matter of time. Back in the 1970s, a magnitude 5.3 quake hit about twenty miles from a nuclear plant in Humboldt, California. The plant wasn’t damaged, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decided to close it anyway. The issue of what would happen to a nuclear power plant—especially the hot core—in a strong quake was one of many unanswered questions. They were nowhere close to solving it.
The helicopter banked right and crossed the Mississippi a few miles south of the power plant. The shadowy line in the ground disappeared at the edge of the river, which twisted in a long S curve.
“That’s one of the most powerful rivers in the world,” Jacobs said. “The last of the New Madrid quakes cut right through it. Pushed it around like a kid playing with wet sand. Every time I think about a natural force that strong, it kinda takes my breath away.”
NEAR MAYFIELD, KENTUCKY
JANUARY 12
1:25 P.M.
THE UH-60 BLACK HAWK PUT DOWN AT A SMALL National Guard airfield north of Mayfield, where Seismic Commission officials had arranged to have three Ford Explorers waiting out by the runway. The geologists formed two-member teams and fanned out across the southwestern quadrant of Kentucky, the area that had continued to show intense seismic activity.
Within thirty minutes of landing, Atkins and Walt Jacobs were on their way in a rented blue Explorer loaded with three portable seismographs. They had a long day ahead of them.
The teams wanted to set up an array of twelve instruments on a 120-mile line running roughly from the Mississippi River east to Kentucky Lake. The plan was to have the network up and running within fourteen hours, which meant a grueling day. Each team had three or four stops to make, many of them in remote, rugged country.
There was an unspoken sense of urgency. The recent tremor that had struck near Kentucky Lake was the strongest since the magnitude 7.1 event two days earlier. Sixty-eight small quakes had been logged in that area during the last ten hours, most of them a magnitude 2 or less, so weak they couldn’t be felt.
The geologists wanted to harvest as many seismic waves as possible, then use them as earth probes to create computer-enhanced images of what was happening in the ground. It was an unprecedented opportunity to study the crustal rock.
Everyone knew this chance would last only for a short time. They had to gather the data now, before the quakes ceased.
After the discovery of the previously undetected fault that ran south beyond Memphis, Atkins wondered if the strong ground activity in western Kentucky indicated the same thing. Was it possible they’d find another branch or segment of the New Madrid Seismic Zone?
He’d spent much of the day thinking about that and was still mulling over the possibilities as he and Jacobs sped due east on the Sam Purchase toll road. The hazy sky of the early morning had given way to beautiful afternoon sunshine. It was just over forty degrees. Fine weather. Jacobs was driving, pushing well over the sixty- mile-an-hour speed limit. He had a bluegrass CD blaring in the stereo. The sound went perfectly with the rugged countryside.
They were on their way to their last stop—an abandoned coal mine. They wanted to set up one of the portable seismometers underground. This would eliminate the possibility that the instrument would pick up any “background” noise such as automobile traffic. Jacobs had already arranged the trip with the company that owned the mine. The Golden Orient plunged two thousand feet into the ground, one of the deepest mines in the state.
Atkins kept returning to the foreshock-aftershock issue. Were all of these recent miniquakes the gradual winding down of the magnitude 7.1 event? Or were they building to an even bigger earthquake?
He’d been arguing it with himself ever since his meeting the night before with Elizabeth Holleran. He had major doubts about the foreshock theory. He’d already talked it over with Jacobs that morning. It didn’t fit with the historical record, which seemed to mitigate against another big quake any time soon on the New Madrid Fault. The recent pattern there was clear. One moderately big quake seemed to occur every ninety years or so.
But Atkins couldn’t quite forget the glaring exception: the three quakes of 1811-1812, each of them a monster.
Jacobs had calculated that up to fifty percent of the elastic strain energy remained stored in the rocks after the first quake in the famous New Madrid sequence—enough to trigger two more huge quakes. It was a sobering statistic, one that Atkins couldn’t overlook.
As he sat in the Explorer’s passenger seat working over all this, Atkins also realized he wanted to see Elizabeth Holleran again.
It was a surprisingly strong feeling, and it explained why he hadn’t gotten much sleep that night, less than four hours, the first time in a long time anything like that had happened.
Ever since he’d lost Sara, he’d found it hard to relax with another woman, to spend time and make the emotional commitment to get to know someone better. He knew what the problem was; a doctor he’d seen had explained it to him: He was still grieving over Sara’s death. The powerful feeling had lasted for years. This desire to see Elizabeth Holleran was totally unexpected.
Jacobs turned off the toll road and drove north about ten miles. They were near the small town of Kaler about fifteen miles northeast of Mayfield. The mine had been closed for more than twenty years, Jacobs explained.
