I'm sure anyone that is a regular reader of this blog of mine has noticed a lot of posts that are about earthquakes and less about aviation. Well, I have always had a great interest in science, being a techie type, but that's not the entire story. I live in a region that has had a lot of recent quakes the past half year or so, including an unusual 40 second 7.2 magnitude (grad) shaker I rode through. I decided then and there to record what I see and experience via my numerous blogs, websites, and now a full blown documentary on earthquakes.
Right after the 7.2 mag (grad) Easter Sunday quake down near Mexicali, Mexico, the one I felt for about 40 seconds - I immediately picked up my camera and started taping what ever I bumped into concerning the quake. To add to all this, I also felt a few moderate to strong quakes over the next few months, and caught some on tape.
All this led me to head into the area where these recent and frequent quakes have been happening, and caught what was going on in the towns and agriculture areas there. There are some seriously failed crops in the Mexicali valley due to broken irrigation ditches, and that will indeed impact the local economy of that part of Mexico. This is one of Mexico's key bread baskets.
I also went into a tiny desert hamlet, Ocotillo, on the USA side of the border, and I caught the locals telling of their earthquake experience. Around April to July, the locals were telling me that they felt a light to moderate quake every 30 seconds or so, and a pretty good vibration about 3 times a day! This town is parked right over an area of earthquake swarms that's a few miles wide, and is said to be related to the Mexicali quake. But these little quakes are far from the epicenter of the bigger quake, and behave in a way that has gotten a lot of geologists and other scientists interested!
And one thing led to another in a wonderful way! While filming Ocotillo and it's locals, I happened to be cooling off with a beer at the Lazy Lizard bar, a small and interesting desert hole in the wall. It was 117 F degrees outside, and a beer and plenty of water was called for after hauling cameras around out in the Yuha desert. That Yuha is our local version of Saudi Arabia's Rub al Khali! The Empty Quarter! Stark blazing white rugged desert with volcanic rocks and fossils.
Anyways, while recovering from my Rub al Khali kinda' day, with an ice cold Bud - a big dusty desert dude walked in. My cameraman was a total sissy and was scared of these rough looking desert dwellers. I'm used to them and get along fine. I'm from cowboy country and am pretty much a cowgirl anyways. But Harvard grad sissy cameraman wanted out of there, as was always the case. He prefers the Volvo littered landscape of snooty-ville. You know, Cambridge.
Myself, the least snobbish of the two person crew, and the dusty desert dude struck up some talk. Desert Dude and I started talking about the present earthquake swarm, and he mentioned that the ground seemed to be rising over the last two years, until it dropped two feet during the 7.2 Mexicali earthquake. Wow. Really...
Now that can have a few meanings in geology. It can simply be ground water changing in the aquifer below, or a shift in magma if there is magma underfoot. It could also mean a fault had shifted back and forth under immense tectonic stresses.
Will Desert Dude told me more. A bridge had been torn apart by the rifting forces. I went out there to look and sure enough it was a torn up bridge, it's planks pulled apart indeed. It's supporting columns displayed signs of side to side motion, too. I filmed it, as you can imagine. We experienced a small quake while filming and Scared Cameraman freaked out. I caught that on my own camera. Oh yes. Funny.
Back at the Lazy Lizard Bar, Desert Dude then told me about a team of scientists that were in town a few days ago. Desert Dude had dug ditches and holes for these men, and then the visitors placed instruments into the holes. They were magnetometers. They measure emissions from the stressed fault rocks.
That conversation in the bar let me to eventually meet these scientists! And in my next post, I will tell you about how all this ended up with me helping a key experiment and 'saving the day" for some leading edge scientists.
I did that with my aerospace and camera know how.
Point I'm making: Opportunities pop up from adversities, and your skills as a pilot or otherwise can translate into other tech things. Don't miss those opportunities.
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