Science Friday - Drone Radar, Fracking Seismology, Massive Earthquakes. April 20, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: April 20, 2018

The 1783 eruption of Laki in Iceland lasted eight months, blanketing parts of the island in lava flows 50 feet deep, and spewing noxious gases that devastated crops and poisoned livestock. Tens of thousands died in Iceland, but the eruption killed millions more around the world, when ash from the eruption cooled the Earth, ushering in an icy winter, and weakening monsoons across Africa and Asia. In her new book The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them), seismologist Lucy Jones describes the devastation of Laki and other geological disasters. She joins Ira to discuss natural calamities throughout human history, from Pompeii to Fukushima, and why humans have such trouble planning for and responding to the uncertainty of natural disasters. The evidence is mounting that hydraulic fracturing—fracking—is causing at least some increase in earthquakes in the U.S. From Oklahoma to Ohio, researchers have linked spikes in earthquakes to the added pressure of water too close to fault lines. Often these quakes have been linked to post-operation wastewater injections. But when will a fracking operation itself cause an earthquake? Miami University geologists Michael Brudzinski and Brian Currie join Ira to discuss their findings in the bedrock of eastern Ohio. Plus: Humans have made the world a pretty tough place for our fellow species to live. As a species, we’re raising global temperatures, destroying natural habitats, and littering the oceans with our junk. But that’s not bad news at all for one adaptive bacteria. In 2016, scientists discovered that Ideonella sakaiensis had evolved to produce an enzyme that enabled it to eat plastic bottles. Now this week, scientists have discovered a way to tweak that enzyme to do the work 20 percent faster. Popular Science senior editor Sophie Bushwick joins Ira to discuss how researchers are looking to harness the bacteria’s penchant for plastic trash, and other science headlines, in the News Round-up. And in the State of Science, we check in on Springfield Beckley Municipal Airport in Ohio, where a new drone radar system takes flight. Ann Thompson of WVXU in Cincinnati tells Ira more. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Coming to you today from Cincinnati Public Radio. Later in the hour, Dr. Lucy Jones is here to talk about her book, The Big Ones, including California's biggest natural disaster. It was a flood, not an earthquake. And what studying past disasters can tell us about the next big calamity. But first, humans have made the world a pretty tough place for our fellow species to live. We're raising global temperatures, destroying natural habitats,

with development and littering the oceans with junk, especially, you know, plastic junk. But one adaptive little bacteria from, well, that says that's okay because it produces an enzyme that lets it break down plastic bottles for energy. And scientists studying this enzyme report that they have been able to make it work even better. Here with the details, as well as other short subjects in science, as Sophie Bushwick, senior editor for Popular Science. Hi, Sophie. Hi, Ira.

Let's talk about why were scientists looking at this plastic eating enzyme? Well, so this enzyme eats a specific kind of plastic called polyethylene terathylate or PET. And what's great about that is that this is the main plastic in soda bottles. People buy about a million soda bottles every minute, and so they're a major source of plastic waste. And the fact that this enzyme can break them down means that it might be a way to recycle it. So instead of having to constantly make new bottles, people could use the leftover bottles, break them down, and then make new ones out of that material. Is the idea to have the bacteria, to employ the bacteria, or just use the enzyme that the bacteria use? The idea is to use the enzyme that the bacteria use.

So researchers were studying that enzyme. It's called PET ACE. And they actually, they tweaked the structure to compare it to a different molecule, and they ended up making it even more efficient. So the new updated version of PETAs can break down plastic in a few days under normal circumstances. It would take 450 years to do the same thing out in nature. Wow, I can't wait for, you know, to see how this works out. Me too. Sounds exciting.

Next, researchers have identified antibiotic resistant bacteria in New York City mice. You know, I normally would say to you, why is this bad news? but it answers the question itself, doesn't it? Yes, definitely. Researchers looked in four of the boroughs of New York. They were looking in, I think, eight different buildings. They found 400 mice, and then they tested their droppings. And in the droppings, they found actually some new viruses.

And in addition to that, they found antibiotic-resistant versions of certain bacteria-like e-coli. And where would the mice be getting this from? Well, the mice could be getting it from humans if they're consuming sort of thrown out antibiotics or contaminated food. But the really worrisome thing is this just shows the sheer spread of antibiotic resistance. There's really nowhere, it seems, where there's not some antibiotic bacteria lurking. Are they fearful that the mice might spread it back to people? I think that's definitely a potential issue. But I think that's not the main concern that the researchers had.

It seems that they were more worried about this indicates just how far antibiotic resistance has spread, and they were hoping they could do more work to find out just how it got to these mice. So the mice were sort of the canaries here. Exactly. They're not looking for a way to curb this, but just that they found this is so prevalent everywhere. Yeah, definitely. And, I mean, it's also a reminder that, you know, if you have a mouse problem, you should try to tackle it and get rid of them. Don't literally tackle the mice.

No, please don't. I imagine that would be very difficult anyway. Oh, yeah. What, there are people out there. All right, moving on, aside to say that they've uncovered tiny diamonds embedded in a meteorite. It gives us information about what was happening when our solar system was being formed. Tell us about that.

Right. So these are diamonds so small. They're about 100 microns wide. That's roughly the width of a human hair. And a lot of researchers have been studying the diamonds themselves. But this latest study looked inside the diamond. So the diamonds sort of preserved material in pockets within them that otherwise would have been destroyed or lost. And in particular, they found a kind of material that could only form under very high pressures.

The pressures that it would require are so high you'd only find them within a planet that's between the size of Mercury and Mars. So now researchers think that this meteorite is what remains of a very early planet that was destroyed in the early days of the solar system. Wow. So there was there's a missing planet. There's probably more than one. So these days we have several rocky planets in the solar system. But back in the very or in the youth of the solar system, you might say, there were tens of sort of early planets, of the beginnings of planets. And it was just so chaotic that a lot of these big rocks would collide and some of them would be thrown entirely out of the solar system. others would be destroyed. They think this particular, these remains that they found most recently were probably from a planet that was destroyed.

Somewhere, so it would have to be sort of in the inner solar system where the rocky planets are, not out with the gas giants and things. Yeah, potentially. Wow. That is exciting. So, do we know about the conditions of the planet the diamonds came from other than its size? Was it long enough, around long enough to have an atmosphere? Was it fully formed? or was just when the solar system was forming?

I'm not sure. I think all I'm positive about is that they know the size and the approximate mass of it and that it was around very early in the solar system. I see another, there's another movie on the horizon here about another planet. Finally, there's a new species of ant that have an interesting way of defending their colony. There's 15 new species of exploding ant.

I beg my pardon. It's just really exciting. Well, you said exploding ant. Right. So as a defense mechanism, a certain worker class among these ants can literally, they can have their abdomen rip open and they have these glands that produce this kind of toxic goo. So by sacrificing their own lives, they can get this goo on an intruder and slow it down or kill it and prevent it from attacking the rest of the nest. So that's the job of this ant is to be the walking bomb if it has to be. That's exactly right. take out.

There must be just a group of ants that might be attacking. I guess there are enough of these exploding ants to do the job. Right. You can, they've actually, they have a photo in the study of a larger ant species that was attacking in the nest, and it's being set upon by three of these smaller exploding ants that are, you know, committing suicide in order to take down their larger attacker. Wow. And that's not the only adaptation.

So in the same, in one of these species, they have another class of worker. the researcher is called the doorkeeper, and it looks kind of like if the ant ran into a wall and flatten the front part of its head, and it comes by that naturally so that if there's something trying to get into the nest, it can use its head as a blocker, as like a door to the nest

and prevent anyone from entering. Wow, Sophie. Always pleasure to have you on, bring us this new step. Thank you, Sophie. Thanks. Soviet Bushwick, senior editor at Popular Science. Now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERN.

St. Louis Public Radio Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national importance, and there's a lot of interest in drones. Companies like Amazon and the military are investing in the tech, but how do you safely fly a drone in congested areas? Ohio is opening a test site at the Beckley Municipal Airport in Springfield to research one aspect of this question.

The Air Force and the state of Ohio installed a $5 million prototype radar system at the Beckley Municipal Airport in Springfield. as a sort of air traffic control system for drone operators. Pending FAA approval, this radar will potentially help drone operators detect other aircraft up to 200 miles away. Ann Thompson is here to fill us in on that story. She's a reporter at WVXU here in Cincinnati. Welcome to Science Friday.

Hi, I are. Thanks for having me. So what's the issue with this radar system? What is it trying to solve? All right, so here's the issue. We've got an estimated $4 million drones in the U.S. by 2021, and so the FAA is under increasing pressure to keep the skies safe. Right now, drone operators have to fly line of sight, meaning they rely on ground-based observers and chase aircraft.

So Raytheon worked with the Air Force to develop, as you mentioned, and deploy a radar which allows drone operators to detect and avoid other aircraft. So how does the radar work? What information is it sending to the drone operator? So it's pulling together data from the air traffic control network, in this case, Dayton, Columbus, and London, Ohio, as well as transponder information from the airplanes and information from the drone ground control station. And what we've got is we have an air traffic controller in an RV.

There's a pilot program, so it's literally. That's right. So he's in an RV with this new enhanced radar. It's the same radar that the air traffic controller in the tower will see. So the tower air traffic controller dealing with the planes, this guy is dealing with the drones. And his idea is to tell the drone operators to stay away from the plane? That's right. So he would say, you know, such and such a plane is coming, you know, to your left and you need to move out of the way. And I imagine sooner or later they'll tell that to the airplane pilots themselves as a drone in your neighborhood. Yes, same, same radar is being used in this case in the tower. All right. Let's talk about the hobbyist droneers. Are they part of this

program or is this sort of a commercial military experiment? This is being used. just by the military, the Air Force, right, Patterson Air Force Base, and it will ultimately include commercial testing for companies, like you mentioned, Amazon, after the state of Ohio gets its approval. But for the military, it's making it very easy to test because they'd have to go out of state, and this is just very close to them. This is a rural area, and there are lots of companies that could benefit. Yeah, so you can't pick up your drawing and go out to this site. No, you can't, not yet. No. Is this the first of its kind around the country. So there is something in New Mexico at the Cannon Air Force Base that is

using an earlier version of this system. But it's very different. It involves a transit corridor that passes through unrestricted airspace. And so aircraft one at a time or drones have to pass through this unrestricted to get to restricted airspace. And it's working fine there. But this would be a much bigger area and then would be beyond line of sites. So it would be the first of its kind. Is this sort of a gateway project for Ohio and drone research? Does it want to become a hub? It does. In fact, some years ago, it wanted to be one of the FAA test sites, but it didn't get it. But we had all the technologies that they figured just go ahead. And there is so much interest in this area and technology that it is becoming that. And Amazon has chosen Ohio.

It has chosen Ohio, and it is building a new center at our airport. Some years ago, it tested in Wilmington, another airport that's involved in drones, with drone technology. Well, Ohio, the Wright brothers, it seems like a good place to begin something, doesn't it? I think so. Aunt Thompson is a reporter here at WVXU here in Cincinnati. Thank you for being part of our show. After the break, fracking for oil and gas has led to a doubling of earthquakes in the state of Ohio. how finding the fingerprints of humanity in the earth's tremors may lead to less risky fracking.

Fracking its goal. Coming up after the break, stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The state of Ohio is not exactly known for its earthquakes. But in 2011, a magnitude four quake shook Youngstown. And in 2014, a series of smaller quakes rattled the same area, 77 of them, to be precise. And coincidentally, Youngstown, the Youngstown area, is the site of numerous oil and gas fracking operations, as well as sites where wastewater from fracking is injected back into the earth's crust.

And research on fracking sites across the country has been pointing to wastewater injection as a stimulus for earthquakes. But get this, those 2014 Youngstown quakes, they were traced back to fracking itself, not the wastewater, water, activating faults deep below the earth that were previously unknown. And in response to the spike in seismic activity, the state of Ohio ordered better seismic monitoring near oil and gas wells, so whales can be shut down if tremors strike. But how exactly are geologists connecting quakes to human activity? And in the aftershocks of the fracking boom, can we learn to predict and even prevent seismic consequences?

We're in Cincinnati today with two of the researchers who have been studying this problem. Brian Curry, Associate Professor of Geology at Miami University in Oxford. Welcome, Brian. Thanks for having us. And Mike Brousinski is Professor of Seismology at Miami University. Welcome, Mike. Very excited to be here. Let's talk about the fracking.

It seems pretty well understood at this point that fracking-related activities, Mike, are causing earthquakes. But what makes it obvious? How can we really know that for sure? So the observations from Ohio are very helpful in the sense that we don't have as many oil and gas wells being hydraulically fractured, and so we can pinpoint the time and location of the earthquakes and how they match up very precisely with the operational activities. Let's go back to that 2014 series. You traced a group of quakes back then to fracking wells. Even the U.S. Geological Survey says most of the seismic activities from fracking is actually from the wastewater.

So how often can we trace an earthquake back to the first? fracking itself. So, yeah, in Ohio, we've seen a larger number of cases being associated with a hydraulic fracturing process itself as opposed to the wastewater disposal. But that is somewhat unique to Ohio. There are other places where waste disposal seems to be the primary driver of earthquakes. And why is this distinction important? So I think from a regulatory perspective, folks want to try and make sure that they are properly connecting the seismicity with who is responsible for it. And so So in a place like Ohio, there is plenty of waste disposal wells, plenty of hydraulic fracture wells.

We don't want to make every company have to deal with this problem, only those that are starting to produce the seismicity. Give me a quick thumbnail sketch, how fracking happens and how the wastewater is involved in it. Sure. So hydraulic fracturing is a process that's become more popular over the last decade in the sense that it is a way to stimulate oil and gas production from formations, rock layers, that it would be more difficult to get the oil and gas from, things you'd

have to wait very long time frames to get the oil and gas from. And so fracturing those reservoirs allows for us, allows for folks to collect the oil and gas more quickly. And so the process of waste disposal is when folks are retrieving the oil and gas from these rock layers down a few miles below the surface, the water that comes back is rather dirty. And so we don't want that in getting into our drinking supply. And so folks are injecting that down, in some cases, even deeper than the rocks that they're harvesting the oil and gas from to try and keep it away from people. Now, Brian Curry, your finding is that these activities aren't necessarily creating new fault lines, but they're reactivating very old ones.

Yes, those faults have been there for, in some cases, billions of years, or at least a billion years in the Appalachian Basin where we're looking at these events. And so primarily you have ancient fault systems that have developed since, like I said, said about a billion years ago and younger, as a result of the interactions of plate tectonic interactions with different periods of collision and extension that has gone on along the eastern margin of North America. And so those faults are there. They're underneath and within the same strata where we're producing the oil and gas from and where we're reinjecting the wastewater in the disposal operations. Is it basically just a, you know,

taking the friction away from the rocks under there? It's just like grease? It's sort of greasing the skids? That is one of the primary ways that these faults are being reactivated. You can think of it as, you know, if you go down the subsurface, any of the little teeny tiny microscopic pore spaces between individual rock fragments and grains, is going to have fluid in it. And that fluid is under pressure.

Now, when we inject things back into the subsurface and or, you know, do the hydraulic fracturing that is adding hydraulic pressure to the rocks to break them, those pressures are increased. And so any water that's under pressure that might be in a fault zone, if you're increasing that pressure, you just sort of cushion the fault zone to the point where you can have slip on it within the regional stresses that actually exist in the subsurface. Does it matter what kind of rock is on top of those fall lines?

It depends. So you can think of these. these fault zones is, in many cases, vertical planes within the earth, and they're cutting many different zones. And so in some cases, they're cutting the sedimentary rocks that you're doing the oil and gas extraction and injection into. And in some cases, they're going way down deep into these igneous and metamorphic rocks in the basement. And we've been finding that those areas are the places where the larger events are happening, but they're also occurring up closer to where the injection and the fracking is going. Now, as you,

learn more about where the areas and what causes the little earthquakes and the bigger ones, can you sort of look at a fault line in advance? You know, look at an area yet? Are we not at that point? We say, look, if we do some fracking here, you're nodding your head about yes and no. We'd love to be able to say exactly where the faults are, but yeah, the technology is not at that point yet. I think what we're trying to help with is general areas that have higher risk versus general areas that have lower risk, that trying to look at where these, as Brian described them, the basement faults, the deeper rock layers that have the much older faults that are more mature and can produce these larger earthquakes. If the operations are closer to those faults,

the likelihood seems to be larger. And so those are suggestions we can make to industry, to regulators to point them to areas that have higher risk versus other areas that have had plenty of operational activity and not seen any seismicity. And so in the basins where these are happening. In some places, we know where those faults actually live. But in other cases, they're very small, and really, we don't know those faults exist until they are being reactivated by the injurious activities. You know, Oklahoma has so many little earthquakes. They say there are more earthquakes than days in the year in Oakland, 300 a year or more. Days in a century. Is that right? But do they detect, or these just happen all the time, and a lot of them don't just

get passed by. So we've been working on this problem lately to try and better understand how many earthquakes have been happening in Oklahoma. The catalog over the last decade shows, you know, there's increased from a handful a year or two, you know, over a thousand a year now. A thousand a year now. And part of that comes from trying to improve our ability to detect those small events, right? The largest events we've seen lately are in the sort of magnitude five range. But trying to better understand the very small earthquakes has been part of the process we've worked on. And do you talk to Oklahoma about this?

Absolutely, yeah. So, again, as you mentioned, the relationship between hydraulic fracturing itself and earthquakes is something that we focused a lot of our attention on because it is more rare. So we wanted to better understand it. But we found that, yes, this process is happening in Oklahoma as well. And so we've had a chance to talk with regulators and operators out in Oklahoma, too. And it's a little bit more difficult to recognize those events in Oklahoma because most of their events are related to the wastewater disposal. So it's trying to find the smaller and,

less frequent hydraulic fraction-related events in all that noise. And you guys do consulting work for the fracking companies. Right. So we've been trying to help both the regulatory side by trying to interact with Ohio Department of Natural Resources and, as we said, in Oklahoma, the Corporation Commission. But yes, we've been working with folks in the industry. We realize that one of the ways to do that is to form a small consulting company. And so that's been helpful to try and interact better with industry.

And now after the earthquakes in 2011 and 2014, as I mentioned before, the state of Ohio got a lot more careful about monitoring the fracking wells, right? Are there other policy recommendations your work could lead to? So I think, you know, at this point, we're trying to help folks recognize that many of these cases, the seismicity starts as swarms of very small earthquakes. And so if you're just waiting for a larger event that might trigger a regulatory response, it's actually better for folks to look at any potential seismicity early on at much smaller level. So for right now, the magnitude threshold in Ohio is 1.5. So, you know, this helps folks to see that Ohio has been, has a pretty strict regulatory threshold for earthquakes in the sense that events that you might typically feel are up closer to a magnitude 3.

So folks are trying to make sure this problem is dealt with well before people would feel it. But our recommendation is to look even smaller than that from operational perspective to tell companies, see if you can get out there and monitor events at smaller levels because that'll give you some idea. Larger magnitudes could potentially occur. And it's important for the companies if they want to keep doing what they do because here in Ohio, since we have those relatively low thresholds, the state can come in and shut you down. Is that right? Yeah.

And that has happened here. So I think in Ohio, we have some of the most stringent regulations in that regard. And because of that, the companies are taking heed of trying to better characterize any problems that they might be having early, such that they can avoid being shut down by the state. Let's go to the phones. We have a question from Wyoming. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, good afternoon.

Sorry, I was what they call a treater, on a front of. frack crew so we would sit in the frack van and we would actually treat the job and we'd be going a hundred barrels a minute at 8500 pounds of pressure through a point line and through a tree so when i was in gulfrey oklahoma at night we would stay in the hotel and you would actually feel that you would feel the earthquakes because you know we're doing we're fracking all around there so you know you pump that much 100 barrels a minute at 8500 pounds of pressure down four miles it's definitely going to crack that rock open, and then you have the sands to keep it proper open to let that oil and gas flow out.

These guys are nodding the head like they know what you're talking about. That's the whole point. So when they're pumping those pressures and those rates down hole to actually break the rock such that there provides a pathway for the oil and gas that is in those very, very impermeable rocks to go flow into the wellboard. So they want to break the rock. And so that's just part of the process. And there are earthquakes that are micro earthquakes that are associated with that very process.

And so for years, I've been interacting with folks in industry and they're like, of course there are earthquakes that are happening, but they're all in the zone. Well, that's the question. Doesn't matter that you have all these time. Well, I think so because you're starting to generate large earthquakes way out away from where their targets are. In some cases, several kilometers. And so from the perspective of the industry, they're actually putting energy into the rock to

break it. And energy has to go someplace. But they're breaking it someplace. They don't want it to happen. So it's been a conversation with the companies because they don't want that to happen because for some reason what they're trying to do is not focused effectively on the horizons that they're interested. I would add to this caller's example from Oklahoma. The issue in an area like that is, yes, there's plenty of hydraulic fracture wells going on in that area of Oklahoma. there are also a large number of very large rate waste disposal wells in that area. And so one of the biggest difficulties we have in areas like that is trying to discern, you know, what is the primary cause?

It looks like there are multiple things that could be generating the size missing in an area like that. This is why we've been focusing on Ohio. It's much easier to separate what is associated with hydraulic fracturing versus what is waste disposal. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios here in Cincinnati talking about Friday. with Brian Curry and Mike Brzezinski. What's the worst-size earthquake that comes out of, Frank? So the largest event we've seen associated with this waste disposal process has been a 5.8, 5.9,

depending on who you ask in Oklahoma. And so, you know, this is at a level where we are concerned about damage to buildings that could potentially injure people. And so, you know, I would echo what Brian said earlier, you know, well, yes, many of the events associated with these activities are quite small. We want to make sure that we prevent these larger events. And so it does appear that regulations have had an influence. There's been regulations in place now in Oklahoma to reduce the volumes that are being injected with disposal wells, as well as to reduce the earthquakes associated with the hydraulic fracturing process. And the

number of earthquakes has come down over the last couple years. Let's go to the phones to Carolyn in California. Hi, Carolyn. Hi there. Hi there. Go ahead. What I'd like to know, I'd like to know if fracking activity could affect the huge Yellowstone Caldera area. Oh, we have a lot of smiles in the studio here. She doesn't find it funny.

No, not at all. And so I would suspect that the amount of energy that you're putting into ground in a typical hydraulic fracturing job is several tens of orders of magnitude, less than the energy that would be required to erupt a super volcano in the Yellowstone Caldera. So I can confidently say that that is not a real problem. Yeah, I mean, you know, there are a couple of things at play here. I think one is that, you know, folks are concerned about Yellowstone, that as there's discussion has occurred over time about past geologic events associated with Yellowstone, folks see

the doomsday scenario associated with Yellowstone. that a very large super volcanic eruption is a scary slot. But fortunately, this is a process that has only happened very infrequently over hundreds of millions of years. And so, you know, it's not something we anticipate happening anytime soon. And as Brian described, the energy associated with these processes are so small relative to the energy that would be necessary to generate those kind of movements in a volcano. It's not something that we're thinking about in our studies. make light of the question. But, you know, it's interesting that, Brian, you mentioned that the industry is saying,

why are you so surprised? You're, you know, you're, you know, mucking around with the stratum, what do you expect to happen? That's really not true. No? Because I have a very good friend who works in an oil and gas company, and I went out and gave a talk at his company last spring, and he was like, I can't believe that this is actually happening. Because, you know, we know that we break the rock, but we don't know, we didn't know that we're actually making earthquakes someplace out away from where we're trying to increase the permeability in our rocks.

So, yes, it's something that the industry is very interested in because it's not something that they are trying to do at that scale. And they're probably surprised how far away. Absolutely. They're local fracking. I mean, so you have a, you have bad press for them on all sides. I mean, one of the reasons I can imagine is that, you know, here you have people talking about, you know, where there are water getting on fire and other, all these earthquakes and little things like that, and then it happens further than the site.

Well, we've run out of time. I'd thank both of you from Miami University in Oxford, Brian Curry, Associate Professor of Geology, and Mike Rosinski. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. In 2010, a volcano in Iceland spit up a cloud of ash so big. It grounded airplanes across Europe and the North Atlantic. You remember that? Oh, yeah, made big news because we're not used to having a volcano

dictate our flight schedules. But that was nothing compared to a much bigger, much deadlier eruption several hundred years before. It was called the Laca eruption in 1783 and 84 in Iceland. It spewed lava and noxious gases for eight months, killing more than 10,000 people in Iceland. But the eruption killed millions more around the world because all of that ash chilled the planet, disrupting monsoons, ushering in a deadly winter, and yet it's sort of largely forgotten today. And if you ask Californians what's the worst natural disaster to ever occur in the state? A lot of them are going to point to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. But in fact, the worst disaster was not an earthquake, but a flood, 1861 to 62,

that made a deep lake out of California's Central Valley. But just try to find a Californian who knew about that. Those are just a few of the incredible stories of natural disaster. Seismologist Lucy Jones writes about in her new book, The Big Ones, How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us and What We Can Do About Them. The book describes not only what happened during great quakes and tsunamis and eruptions, but what happened next and the psychology behind planning for uncertain tragedies. Why are we so prone to forget the past and prepare for the future?

Welcome out to Science Friday, Dr. Jones. Oh, thanks for having me. Now, let's talk about the – this was absolutely fascinating. I mean, there's a lot of great stuff in your book. I love the book, but I was just blown away by the California – the California flood story, the natural disaster, the biggest one. Tell us about what that was about. Well, I also had no idea that it happened, even though I'm a fourth generation, Southern Californian, until we went to make a scenario, a model of what we thought a big flood would be like.

And I – asking the hydrologists, and they tell me about this. And it's sort of hard to believe. It rained over the whole state. In fact, it's also the worst rain event ever in Oregon and Nevada as well. It created a 300 mile long lake down the Central Valley. It moved the mouth of the Santa Ana River by six miles. It completely destroyed, washed away the largest town between Los Angeles and New Mexico, a place that was called Agamansa. I mean, it was a level of devastation that is extraordinary. It destroyed one third of the taxable land, killed 1% of the population, destroyed the ranching industry by drowning all the cattle. So it's sort of the ultimate catastrophe, the one that really changes the nature of the society that's there. And yet, you know, we forgot. And the interesting thing is when we said, go look, how could you possibly forget these sort of things? The psychologists have some pretty good explanations for it. There's something called a normalization bias because when we were evolving into human beings,

if you worried about the 100-year flood instead of the wolf who was about to eat your children, your DNA didn't get passed down. And we're very hardwired to look at the most recent disasters and forget about the longer-term ones. So we still think about an earthquake and not about a flood. That might be. Yeah. Because you say that one's going to happen again, as certain as another big earthquake is going to hit. California. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, there's also the issue that the earthquakes are more

frightening to us because they are so random and we don't see them coming. Whereas the rain, right, we can predict the rain, you see the water coming. I mean, who's afraid of the rain, right? And we just can't get our mind around the ideas that our floods are as dangerous as earthquakes. Now, a report came out this week called the haywired scenario about the Hayward fault at the Hayward He wired it. He would fall. I get it. In the eastern San Francisco Bay. Give us a lowdown on that report. Well, that's actually like the scenario we created for the Big Flood and the shakeout scenario, which was the Southern California version. It was started before I left the USGS. It reminds us that when the fault runs right through a city, you get a very different level of damage and that proximity to the fault really does exacerbate the damage. So this is more like the Conto earthquake which destroyed Tokyo in 1923.

The fault was literally under the city, and 60% of the buildings in Tokyo were gone afterwards. The Hayward Fault similarly runs right through the East Bay, and is going to cause much more damage than earthquakes on faults just a little ways away. And you mentioned when you look back at the history of the 1861 flood and the other earthquakes, that California was relatively sparse. you know, over 100 years ago. But if something like this is going to happen and be inevitable, you're right, how much more dire the future is going to be than what happened,

even before? Well, right. I mean, we have a much greater population. 1% of the population that was killed in that flood was 4,000 people. We now have 40 million people living here. I don't think we're killing 400,000. But we have also increased our vulnerabilities because of all the systems we put in place to support urban life. we are now incredibly dependent on electricity, where if it goes away, people literally die, or the flood control that we have put in to protect ourselves from those floods.

And one of the reasons that we forget that California has such a flood problem. But think about last winter where the Oroville Dam came close to failing. A bit more rain. If it had failed, we could have been killing many thousands of people just right there. And now I know that you've worked with the L.A. City Hall. to develop an earthquake resilience plan, right? What are some of the measures that have been adopted and what do you think should happen? Okay.

What I think and mostly what happened in L.A. are actually pretty close. It was a very satisfying experience to have the science come together with policy. Number one is remembering that building codes aren't retroactive, so your buildings only as good as the building code in place when it was built. and there are a lot of known killer buildings, and we need to strengthen those. And that's going on in Los Angeles now. A second one is our infrastructure, this idea that we've created this urban life that's very dependent on systems that when they break in a big disaster are going to cause catastrophic health problems and such things.

So strengthening our water system, our sewer system, our electrical system. And all of that's gotten started in L.A., and we're starting to see it some other places as well. And then the third thing, and in some ways this is the most important, even though it's not our lives. You know, when we think about disasters, the randomness makes us very afraid of dying, and it keeps us very focused on the moment. But even in Pompeii, 90% of the victims got out alive. So you're not going to die in this earthquake, almost undoubtedly. Your chance, 99.99% chance you're living through it. But the question is going to be, will our city survive it? What is it going to be like to be in Southern California or any other big city when a disaster really disrupts the systems.

And people may not die, but they may very well just give up and leave. So we need to address our economic vulnerabilities and not consider it solely a life safety issue. There's a great thing happening here in California where the state legislature is actually considering a bill to take our building code, which now says, make sure you crawl out alive, but if it's a total financial loss, well, that's your problem. Raise it up to a standard that says, we don't want disposable buildings. We want to be able to use our buildings after the event. And raising the standard like that would only add about 1% to the cost of construction.

So the state is considering a move to make that mandatory now. Yeah, you write it very well in your book about some famous disasters in history. And some people, some of the key people who actually rose to the occasion and changed. the course of history. Those was one of the most exciting things of this to me was to see both how people handled it really well and of course on some places where they handled it poorly and there's such great consequences to it. I mean, especially you were talking about the Iceland eruption, this figure of the pastor John Steingrinsen, who is a hero in Iceland as the fire priest. He was helping his congregation get ready to leave because the lava was approaching. He preaches a long sermon and

the lava got stopped and did not overtake the church. It actually turns out the lava came into a large enough river that it was able to freeze it up and create a dam. And then after the event, as this poisonous gases were killing everyone, it killed his wife. He was burying five to ten people a day. And he stuck with it. He kept them organized. He got them out to try and find food. He went and petitioned the Danish government for help with the financial support.

and that's where he held his community together. And it's sort of astonishing. Iceland lost almost a quarter of its population and yet came back from it. Easily have been that just like in Greenland, that the Scandinavian settlers could have given up and left or been driven out, but they pulled it back. And it was people like Pastor Yon that really made the difference. But you also write, there are examples where disasters really brought out the worst in people,

like persecution of marginalized groups, like the Mississippi floods of 27. That was one of the hardest things to try and write, and especially when I was writing it, was just as the Black Lives Matter things was coming up and to go back and look at how, you know, when they needed to shore up the levees, they just went through the African American parts of town with guns and forced the African American men up onto the levees to try and shore them up, kept them there at gunpoint as the levees were failing and hundreds were washed away to their deaths. And then in the camps afterwards, the white overseers were afraid that their African-American tenants would, if they were evacuated from the area because of the huge flood, that they

wouldn't come back. So they wouldn't let them be taken out. There was even an incident where people were stranded up on a levee top, surrounded by floodwaters. The boats came and they only let white families get on the boats and they left the black family sitting there with with no water, no sewers, no fresh food. I mean, it's just really quite horrific. It's not the only case. I mean, we saw some of this in Japan where they turned on Korean neighbors. And I ended up saying, you know, we've got to remember that the worst threat from a natural disaster could be the threat to our humanity. Wow, that's a good point to make. There was a lot of government bungling after Katrina in terms of disorganization between the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana.

Is that a unique situation or could that happen elsewhere after it's a master? Failure at that level does require failure at every part of government. So it's definitely at the more extreme cases of it. And it's more symptomatic of seeing how that you're, you know, engineers like to say that systems fail where they're already weak. So it's the crack in the levee where the crevasse forms or, you know, the inherently bad building that falls down in the earthquake. But it's true of human systems as well. And so when our system is corrupted by racism, it's going to make the response to the disaster much uglier. And in New Orleans, it was clear that there was a lot of, there was corruption.

And there was huge animosity between the state and, and the state. the city. And, you know, one fire chief who was sent there in the aftermath told me that when he arrived in, he was called in by the state of Louisiana from California to come help them. He arrived in New Orleans and Mayor Nagin had no idea he was coming, this whole team from California because they so weren't talking to each other. So that type of problem makes it much worse. I hear you. Yeah.

I'm talking with Lucy Jones author of the new book, The Big Ones, and she's also a seismologist at Caltech on Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I know that when you move from a government service, and you were there a while, you founded the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society. Give me an idea. What's the idea behind that institute? Okay. It's to try and address what I see as a big.

gap in the science enterprise. We have our research institutions that do a great job of supporting research. But I was in the U.S. Geological Survey, a federal employee for 33 years, and we have to do what Congress authorizes us to do, and Congress authorizes us to do research. And then on the other side, you've got these people who want to use the information but, you know, aren't going to take a research journal and understand what that is. And there's this whole place in between that you could call science translation that's really not supported in our current system. And that's what I'm trying to do is to help policymakers better understand what the science can tell them, especially about resilience issues. And but then also to help try and help scientists become better communicators

because there's just such, there's like cultural differences in how we talk about our science. And while we're researching it, it's all about, you know, finding the flaws in your colleagues' research, the whole peer review process. We are trained to attack each other. And once it's settled, and you've gone through that attack mode, which is actually really important to understanding whether something's true, and it's now settled, now your researchers are no longer interested in it. Because it's, you know, it's, it's, But now's when the policymakers should really be picking it up. And yet we don't fund or honor that place in between of providing the translation. So that's what I'm trying to do is create a space for it, show the value of it, and hopefully start really encourage others.

Do you tell scientists to speak out when they find that there is a real danger of what their research shows instead of saying, that's not my job. My job is just to do the research? Well, that's what I'm hoping to do. I'm just now starting to develop some training programs for scientists, and it's not just that it's not our job. I would argue that it's actually, it's not my job to make policy. It is my job to make sure a policymaker understands the implications of his decisions. And it's that part that we're really missing. And it's easy for the scientists and engineers once you stay, all right, let's look at the consequences and you see what's so obvious. You want to jump in and say, this is what you should do, and that's sort of jumping over that need of the real policymaker to understand why you're saying that. But sometimes you have the policy makers asking scientists for advice, and they say, I'm not in the advice business. And I've had scientists tell me, you know, when global warming started happening,

they were afraid to speak out and say what was really on their mind because they might cause panic or something like that. Well, that's right. Yeah, that's not my job. It should be obvious, right? And there's sort of this ideal of purity in the science process. And I think we've drawn the line in the wrong place. Instead of saying, here's the journal article, you figure out what it means.

We need to fill in that space that goes from that to here's what the policy implications. You get to decide what you want to do. But if you make this choice, A, the consequence is going to be these towns being flooded. Exactly. Right. Right. Thank you, Lucy Jones. Thank you, Dr. Jones.

Very informative. It's a great book. And you're a wonderful writer. It's good to see scientists, scientists becoming. wonderful writers, too. Lucy Jones is author of The Big Ones and a seismologist at Caltech. Thanks again. We have an excerpt up on our website at Science Friday.com slash the big ones. That's Science Friday.com slash the big ones. One last thing before we go, Science Friday's hitting the road for Pennsylvania next month taking the stage at Pittsburgh Carnegie Library Music Hall. Saturday,

May 19th. We have roboticists and artificial intelligence designers, musical robots, musical humans, to Pittsburgh's own townspeople. So more info and tickets at ScienceFrily.com slash Pittsburgh. That's ScienceFrily.com slash Pittsburgh. Here in Cincinnati, we're very happy to have technical help from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman and Jack Harwoods back in New York. And here, Bill Dean, Don Danko, Kevin Reynolds, Rick Andres, and all the folks at Cincinnati Public Radio who have helped make our visit here so comfortable

and so successful. Have a great weekend. Have a happy productive birthday this weekend. I'm Irafledo in Cincinnati.