SEEN FROM THE BELLY OF THE HELICOPTER, THE plowed muddy fields looked dotted with sand-piles. It was shortly after dawn, and they were clipping along the cotton fields of the Missouri boot heel at two thousand feet. In the shadowy light, it was easy for Atkins’ eyes to play tricks on him.
The strange starburst markings on the ground were a yellowish, powdery-white color. When the light was better, he noticed that the impressions looked smooth and feathered at the edges. Some were huge. They peppered the floodplain that spread out for miles on either side of the Mississippi.
His face glued to a porthole window, Atkins kept clapping his hands, trying to warm them in the biting cold. The team of six geologists on their way to southwestern Kentucky sat on bench seats in the helicopter’s unheated cargo bay. The big olive-green chopper belonged to the Kentucky National Guard.
Atkins knew he was looking at sand blows, but he’d never seen any that compared with these. Each one of those white splotches was a scar, the remains of a miniature volcano that had blown up during the great quakes of 1811 and 1812. The ground beneath them had turned to quicksand.
“Looks like the whole damn boot heel blew up,” Atkins said, shaking his head in disbelief as he tried to imagine what it must have been like.
The sand blows, the result of massive liquefaction, were among the most dramatic evidence that remained of the earthquakes that had also formed fissures and deep craters. There’d also been widespread landslides. The area of severe liquefaction covered 48,000 square kilometers, making it one of the largest earthquake liquefaction zones in the world. The only rival was in the Ganges river plain of India, the result of Himalayan earthquakes.
Liquefaction occurred when an earthquake shook wet soil that was loosely packed and fine-grained, usually a mix of clay and sand. It turned into a dense liquid that resembled quicksand. If the pressure was heavy enough, sand and water were pushed to the surface with such explosive force that they formed sand volcanoes or sand blows. Many were eight to twenty feet across. Some were well over a hundred feet. The hardened conical sides of the sand blows eventually disappeared, leaving all those white marks on the table-flat countryside.
The process had always fascinated Atkins. Jacobs opened his laptop and punched a few keys. The screen displayed various examples of the bizarre sand features, which he showed to Atkins and one of the National Guardsmen who sat beside him.
Jacobs gave directions to the pilot over a headset microphone. Atkins tried to wake up. He’d barely arrived at the airport on time.
On the way, he’d stopped off at the earthquake center. He got there at 4:30 A.M. and left a detailed E-mail message for Guy Thompson. Against his better judgment, he asked his friend to try to do a probability analysis of Prable’s earthquake projections. He also asked him to check the data against Jacobs’ observations. He’d left the two computer disks Elizabeth Holleran had given him. Convinced it was a waste of time, he’d told Thompson to try it only if he had the time. That wouldn’t be easy. Thompson was already working eighteen-hour days.
Atkins suddenly regretted what he’d done. Guy would have plenty of reasons to blow up, and he couldn’t blame him.
He remembered again how he’d stood in the street with Elizabeth Holleran after they left the Blue Sax. She thanked him for pulling that man off her. But she was still completely focused. She asked him again if he could have someone do a computer analysis of Prable’s earthquake data. A tough, good-looking young lady. But he still wished he hadn’t given those disks to Thompson. As soon as he got a chance, he’d try to call him and tell him to forget it.
Jacobs said, “We’re going to fly over the world’s largest sand blow then swing north about twenty miles to New Madrid.”
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 Inferno. Towering geysers of muck thrown up thirty, forty, and fifty feet from deep in the earth. The noise must have been deafening.
“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.”