Rosalea Barker: Something beginning with Ch

::ChiChi::

After the initial shock of reading the reports of the damage the earthquake did to Christchurch on September 4, my next feeling was one of betrayal. Christchurch? The placid little city on the Plains? Why not Wellington, with its obvious fault lines and buildings floating on rubber and its shaky past? Of course, the South Island is just as faulted and has had its share of earthquakes, but this one took place on a previously undiscovered fault so the magnitude of the psychic shock was as least as high as that of the physical one.

As it happened, the long Labor Day Weekend here in the States gave me plenty of time to scour the web looking at news reports, slideshows and videos, and to read blogs and discussion boards. It came as a complete surprise to me that I would feel this earthquake so personally. It wasn’t just that the Avon disgorged itself into my great-grandfather’s park and the seaside suburb his wife had (so unimaginatively) named, but that the buildings familiar to my misspent youth in the city tumbled like a maiden’s protestations after a few too many drinks, and that the rural roads—once so happily traversed with a band of merry pranksters--had cracked and crinkled like pastry pie-tops.

(Note to readers: If you haven’t already misspent your youth, start doing so now!)

::CH—Switzerland::

One of the more interesting comments I read on Public Address was from HORansome who asked simply: Why did Switzerland do this to us? His link led to an entry on the blog CERN Truth, about the Large Hadron Collider, “the strongest gravitomagnetic field on this planet.”

At the date of the updated blog entry, 19 August, “We have so far, 7 top earthquakes: Solomon Islands (7.1) and Haiti (7) in January; Ryukyu islands (7) and Chile (8.8) in February; and an impressive 3 in April, the month in which the LHC started a continuous run: China (7.1); Tijuana (7.2) and Indonesia (7.7). Furthermore, the strongest of those earthquakes, in Chile, happened within hours of the first successful proton run at 3.5 TeV.”

Coincidentally, the September 6 entry on the official CERN website for the LHCb experiment reads: “Beautiful atoms: The LHCb has observed beautiful atoms. The atoms are bound states of the beauty quark and anti-beauty quark. The atoms are bound by the strong force, the force which also binds quarks inside proton.” It doesn’t mention on what date the experiment took place.

Just to cheer you up, here is CERN Truth’s prognosis for the year 2013:

“The black hole will not fall to the Earth but it will become the new, densest center of the Earth and the Earth will fall into LHC’s creation. The process will last a very short time. Some images might be captured on TV but most likely wherever we are, we will just feel a strong wind, and then a blast of attractive forces will crunch and kill us, as the Earth explodes into a Nova.”

(Note to readers: If you haven’t already misspent your entire life, start doing so now!)

::Chim-chiminee::

On a less strident note, I was struck by the contrast in photos taken at two disasters that happened within days of each other—the Canterbury earthquake and the San Bruno fireball. San Bruno is pretty much directly across SF Bay from where I live, and the news here is still full of stories about what happened when a natural gas transmission line exploded, wiping out lives and property in a searing conflagration.

The earthquake pictures show many collapsed brick chimneys; the San Bruno pix show many brick chimneys standing surrounded by what’s left of homes—charred ruins.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE—

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