THE SUN WAS STARTING TO COME UP, REAVELING a chilly gray sky and a landscape that had been torn apart. The sights of cataclysmic liquefaction were everywhere.
Atkins and Elizabeth drove in silence, lost in their thoughts as they surveyed the devastated countryside. They were on Route 61, which paralleled Interstate 55 a few miles to the east. They’d pulled off I-55 when they encountered their first collapsed overpass. They had to drive out into a muddy field to get around the wreckage and wouldn’t have made it without the Explorer’s four-wheel drive. Radio reports said every overpass had been knocked down in the quake zone. Until the debris could be cleared, the major north-south interstate was all but cut off.
No more than ten miles from Blytheville, Arkansas, they were nearing the quake’s reported epicenter. Memphis was about eighty miles due south. Atkins tried to increase the speed, but it was impossible. There were too many obstructions.
Trees were down. Sand blows, volcanic in shape, were still erupting, blasting geysers of mud, carbonized wood, and stone into the air, but not with their earlier force. And the sound they’d noticed most of the long night—the howling roar of the earth cracking open and venting—had all but ceased.
Pushing hard to get to the epicenter, Atkins had to stop frequently to pull around cracks in the highway surface, some of them two and three feet wide. All the delays were maddening. They’d gone nearly four hours without getting a seismograph up and running at the epicenter. That was unforgivable. With each passing hour, they were losing precious data.
In some places, the road looked as though a ditch-digger had cut a deep trench across it.
Despite his increasing sense of urgency, Atkins stopped to inspect one particularly large sand blow. Measuring several hundred feet in diameter and perfectly cone shaped, the crusty sides were about four feet high and had already hardened. Steam was still drifting out of the opening.
Elizabeth slowly approached the side and cautiously touched the steam vapors. She quickly withdrew her hand.
“It’s almost boiling,” she said.
“There’s got to be a strong thermal element at play here,” said Atkins. He was still wondering about the strange light that had made the depths of Kentucky Lake shimmer. It was possible they were caused by thermal disturbances in the crust.
“I hope they’re setting up some good strain-rate databases in Memphis,” Elizabeth said. They needed to know how much energy had been released.
She also hoped they’d gotten the GPS and Radar Interferometry Systems operating again. The satellite data would help them measure with minute precision how much the earth had shifted or risen. And, more important, whether it was still rising, a telltale sign that seismic strain energy continued to build in the ground.
There was so much they needed to know. The greatest need was for seismic information that would help them gather precise data about aftershocks. Where they were hitting. And how often.
The strong-motion seismograph they wanted to install near the epicenter would help them pinpoint the magnitude of the fault that had ruptured. With any luck, it might also show whether any previously undiscovered faults had been activated.
A single seismograph was, at best, of limited usefulness. They needed to set up a whole array of instruments, but that would take time. The seismograph in the back of the Explorer was the best they could do.
Elizabeth was eager to do some trenching along the fault line. If there was ever a time for serious paleoseismology this was it. They might be able to find some clues about what had happened deep in the earth in the ancient past. She wanted to know how often big quakes had occurred—and at what intervals. The data could help them calculate whether or not the massive quake they’d just experienced was likely to be followed by another killer.
Elizabeth didn’t like to consider that possibility, but the history of the New Madrid Seismic Zone showed that it had happened before.
More traffic was out—mainly cars and pickups and, unbelievably, a few eighteen-wheeler rigs trying to avoid I-55. Atkins figured it wouldn’t be long before the authorities closed all highways in the area to everything but emergency vehicles.
Ever since they’d crossed the Mississippi, the change in topography had been striking. The rolling, forested terrain of western Kentucky and Tennessee had given way to country as flat as any desert. They were passing through the Missouri boot heel, a sliver of the state that dipped into Arkansas.
It was part of the Mississippi Embayment, which started roughly where the Ohio River merged with the Mississippi and broadened out in an inverted U to the Gulf of Mexico. The embayment contained the famous Reelfoot Rift, a weak zone in the middle of the North American plate where the earth had tried to pull apart 600 million years earlier. The New Madrid faults were part of the residual scar tissue.
Atkins knew that the northwestern edge of the embayment, the section they were driving through, was the most interesting geologically. The land, an ancient flood plain, was used mainly for agriculture—soybeans and some cotton. The main characteristics were drainage ditches, grain elevators, irrigation pipes, and vast fields crisscrossed with rows of poplar trees.
They crossed the Missouri state line into Arkansas. Blytheville was four miles south, right on Route 61. The epicenter was another five or six miles due south. Atkins took a bypass to get around Blytheville. For the last few miles, they’d noticed dark smoke hanging low on the horizon. The black smudge looked frozen on the gray winter sky.
It was Blytheville burning.
“How many people live there?” Atkins asked.
Elizabeth checked the map. “About thirty thousand,” she said.
It was a much larger town than he’d imagined. He doubted a single building had escaped serious damage and thought, again, about casualties. They were going to be horrific.
Five miles later, the smoke was still visible. Atkins turned west on an unmarked country road. He drove another mile, passing a pair of dark-blue grain silos that had been upended by the earthquake. Corn had poured like gold from the gaping cracks. There wasn’t a house in sight, just cotton fields that had been picked nearly two months earlier and were still white with cotton the machines had missed. It was bleak country.
“What about here?” Atkins asked, pulling to a stop on the shoulder of the road.
They’d reached the approximate location of the epicenter.
Elizabeth nodded. “Look up ahead,” she said.
About a hundred yards down the road, the blacktop had been split wide open. Large pieces of broken pavement were stacked up against each other in overlapping layers. The fissure had gouged the road at a right angle.
Atkins and Elizabeth got out of the Explorer.
“Do you smell that?” Elizabeth asked.
“Ever since we hit the Arkansas line,” Atkins said. The strong odor of sulfur was heavy in the cold air. It was the same smell he’d noticed the night before.
The offset was large. Nothing like what they’d seen on the Mississippi, but still striking. The ground on the far side of the highway, the hanging wall, was at least four feet higher than on their side.
The fissure—it was six feet deep—ran as far as the eye could see in either direction, west to east.
“That looks like classic strike-slip horizontal tearing,” Elizabeth said, walking to the edge of the fissure. “The right lateral movement must have been incredible.”
Shielding his eyes against the wind, Atkins had no doubt that the faulting had generated some monstrous seismic waves.
“I’d suggest we set up around here,” he said.
Somewhere below them, at the hypocenter of the quake, probably at a depth of over five or six miles, one of the major faults in the New Madrid Seismic Zone had ruptured with a tremendous explosion of energy.
This was ground zero.