Get Into James Shorts - 19. Anybody Could

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"Can I talk to you?"

I looked up from my desk and saw one of my students at my office door.

"Sure Cal, come on in. I'm a little busy trying to figure out why an earthquake fault that hasn't moved in 250,000 years just decided to go renegade and hit the valley with a 4.8."

Cal Morris was one of my brighter geology students. Coming from a dusty little town in Nevada, I suppose you either went completely bonkers or became interested in rocks. He parked his backpack on the floor and sat in the chair across from me. I could tell that something was bugging him.

"It's about the earthquake Doc. I think, no I'm sure I caused it."

I grinned and said, "Cal, you're pretty good but..."

"No Doc, hear me out. Do you remember a paper by a guy named Pasternak last year?"

I searched my memory and yes- I did remember that paper. "Isn't he the guy who suggested that sound waves could trigger a slip fault?"

Cal nodded and said, "Yeah, that's the one, and I can tell you it works."

I said, "Cal, start at the beginning and tell me what happened."

The kid shifted nervously in his seat and said, "One of my friends that works at a junkyard got all sorts of sound equipment out of a totaled car: A 1500 watt amp, four big woofers and a lot of other junk. I paid him $300 for the stuff and put it together to test Pasternak's theory."

"Over the weekend, I went camping out near Dry Springs and set up my experiment with four bass speakers spaced out over a kilometer on the old Dry Springs fault line."

"I set up a sine-wave on a function generator at 1 Kilo-hertz and fed it to the amp and began the experiment. At that low frequency, you couldn't hear it. You could feel it. Nothing happened, so I lowered the frequency to a point where the fault began to pick up the harmonic. Once it started, I freaked and shut down but by that point, the whole fault had picked up the harmonic, and the quake started."

I said, "Hold it." I picked up the seismograph strip and said, "When did you start?"

Cal said, "I powered up at 10:00 and began cycling through frequencies. Apparently, I hit the right one at 20 minutes till eleven."

Sure enough- as I went backwards through the tape, the fault began moving in fits and starts at 10:00. As he moved to lower frequencies, the fault became more and more unstable until at 10:38 the small quake began in earnest."

I said, "That explains all the weirdness that I saw on the seismograph. We're damned lucky there was nothing out there to shake up but gophers and sage brush."

Cal said, "That's why I picked that spot Doc. If it worked, it couldn't hurt anything."

I grinned and said, "What on earth possessed you to try to cause an earthquake Cal?"

He looked at me and said, "Pasternak's article has been out there for over a year. If I could do it with a few hundred dollars worth of junk..."

The implications hit me like a train, "Anybody could do it."