THE FIRES HAD BEEN BROUGHT UNDER CONTROL OR extinguished at the ORNL’s Y-12 plant. Engineering teams were out inspecting the damage, trying to determine which buildings had to be demolished. It was dangerous work because of the frequent, strong aftershocks. A bad one killed two engineers when a steel I-beam fell as they tried to check out the “Mouse House.” The eight-story building contained the biology division and got its name from the 125,000 mice kept there as laboratory animals.
Fred Booker scoped out the damage through a pair of powerful Zeiss binoculars. He stood on the deck of his home in the hills that overlooked the plant. Except for losing electricity and having a couple of large windows broken, his tightly constructed, well-anchored A-frame had come through the quake virtually unscathed. Booker got his water from a well operated by a gas-powered pump: he also had an ample stock of canned foods. And Jack Daniel’s. He was in fairly good shape to sit things out.
Booker planned to go back to Y-12 later in the day and offer whatever help he could.
Meanwhile, he had two houseguests—Len Miller and Ed Graves, the young geophysicists he’d been working with in the Shock Wave Laboratory before the quake. They lived in Knoxville, forty miles to the east; Booker had put them up when they were unable to get home.
Both were worried about the flurry of aftershocks.
“There’s still a hell of a lot of strain energy in the ground,” Miller said.
“It’s hard to figure,” said Graves. He’d borrowed one of Booker’s jackets and was standing on the deck in the bright winter sunlight. “Mid-plate quakes like these are damned near impossible to understand. I keep asking myself if something in the lower crust is putting stress on the faults.”
“My guess is it’s a hotspot,” Miller said. Hotspots were well known to geophysicists. Born deep in the earth’s mantle, the layer between the crust and core, they were thermal plumes, gigantic bubbles of molten rock that rose from two thousand miles underground. As much as a thousand miles across and often shaped like the mushroom cloud of a nuclear blast, hotspots played a vital role in keeping the planet from turning into a chunk of space ice.
Graves and Miller likened the earth to a boiling pot of oatmeal. Percolating in a circular convection, it kept pulling heat and hot rock from great depths to the surface, then back down again.
It was their work in this area that prompted their heat studies at the Shock Wave Lab. These slowly rising hotspots helped create volcanoes. And Miller had long believed they could also cause enough deformity in the crust to trigger earthquakes at depths of well over four hundred miles.
Booker wasn’t paying much attention to the discussion. Then Graves casually mentioned how inactive faults could be brought to life by a process called “lubrication.” He likened it to loosening a stuck door hinge with a couple squirts of oil; by reducing friction within the locked fault, you could facilitate motion.
Fascinated, Booker put down his binoculars and listened.
“It’s long been thought mineral fluids or water trapped in a fault could lubricate it enough to trigger an earthquake,” said Graves. “They proved it out in Colorado back in the sixties.” He described how a series of small earthquakes had rocked Denver, an area that had had virtually no seismic activity. During a nine-month period, more than seven hundred small quakes were recorded; then they mysteriously stopped for an entire year. The lull was followed by another outbreak. Eventually, geologists discovered that the Army was injecting contaminated water from weapons production at its Rocky Mountain arsenal deep into the ground.
“They were using bore holes about twelve thousand feet deep,” Graves said. “There was a perfect correlation between the quakes and the injections.”
Miller said, “Remember that USGS experiment in western Colorado? They went out to the oil fields around Rangely and pumped water into some of the wells at high pressure. Guess what? They started getting earthquakes. They could turn them on or off whenever they wanted just by regulating the injections. Turn on the faucet, you get quakes. Turn it off, they stop.”
Graves said, “We had some lively seminar discussions out at Cal Tech about whether you could short-circuit or prevent a big earthquake from happening by setting off a series of smaller quakes. The theory was that if you relieved enough stress building on a fault maybe you could defuse a big one.”
Following the conversation intently, Booker asked, “Could you use a technique like that to relieve the rock stress in this area?”
“Watch it, Ed,” Miller said. “He’s got that wild look in his eyes.”
Booker’s eyes were a dead giveaway whenever he was excited about a concept or an idea. They gave off a burning intensity as they did now. Booker was impatient. He couldn’t wait to rush his two guests back into his spacious living room, so he could ask more questions. He actually nudged them along with light taps on their shoulders.
The room was book-lined and decorated with Navaho blankets and Zuni pottery collected during Booker’s long years at the Nevada Test Site.
“You didn’t answer my question, Ed,” Booker said. He’d begun pacing the length of the room, hands in his pockets, head down. He could hardly stand still. “Could you use the technique you were just talking about to relieve rock stress?”
Graves shook his head. “Even if you were sure it might work—and that’s a huge if in such a geologically unstable area—it would take too long. You’d have to drill all those bore holes and figure out how to get tremendous amounts of water down into the fault at high pressure.”
“You’d also have to decide where to trigger your control quake,” Miller said. “That would be incredibly complicated. And who’s to say you wouldn’t actually set off the very thing you were trying to prevent.”
“But it would still take too long,” Graves insisted. “Granted, we don’t know how much time we’ve got until another big quake hits, if one hits. It might not happen for another two hundred years. But say it was imminent, tomorrow. It would take months, years, and a billion dollars to get enough deep holes bored. The advantage of doing the experiment at Rangely was they were able to use existing deep oil wells.”
Booker had taken out a notebook and was furiously scribbling notes. He stood there a few moments working through a series of figures. Then he slapped the notebook against his leg and said, “Boys, I know a faster way.”