7.1+
By Robert Mariner, East Sierra Branch
Narrator: Dr. Saul Abrams, a medical doctor born, raised and trained on Tel Asagart, a far-distant planet of the Refuge Confederation.
Time: Recent group discussion of our earthquakes of July 4 and 5, 2019.
“Hello, my name’s Saul Abrams. I live on a world called Tel Asagart. If that name sounds at all familiar, in your Nordic mythology the home of the gods was a place you now call Asgärd, though others have called it Valhalla. There’s probably no coincidence involved, as I shouldn’t be surprised if, long ago, one of our observers might have mentioned his or her home world’s name and some of its history, to some of your Northern European people, and it stuck. Mistakes like that can assume a life of their own, and sometimes come back to bite you thousands of years after the fact.
“Most of the people on my world are physically robust, blue-eyed and blond- to red-haired, which also seems to have survived in your legends. Tel Asagart, Asagaard, Asgärd – the progression of the way that name has been rendered here on Home isn’t all that surprising. What’s interesting to me, though, is the way different parts of a real story seem to have gotten lost, confused or distorted in different regions of Europe.
“Anyway, around 4,800 years ago, we had an event pronounced vaguely like Ragnarok. The threat was from the Surotar, not Surtur, and it wasn’t the end of the world for us, just temporarily for our seaport city of Falahall, which name your legends seem to have turned into Valhalla.
“Remember your July 5th magnitude 7.1 earthquake? Well, for weeks we had a whole series of foreshocks about like that one and bigger, culminating in a truly enormous movement in the Surotar Deep – something like your Marianas Trench – section of the Ragnaro subduction zone, which is just off the coast from Falahall. Total movement was over half a mile of horizontal and nearly 250 feet of vertical as the ocean floor drove under the continental plate, and pressure ridges both on- and offshore subsided. The foreshocks pretty much leveled Falahall, which finally caught fire and burned for over a week before the main event. Imagine hundreds of earthquakes like your 7.1, or bigger, over the span of several weeks before the ‘Big One,’ as you people in California call the one you’re expecting.
“Falahall sank beneath the waters of Odnar Bay, taking with it the last salvage ship and crew in port – the Bifrost, Captain Oden commanding. The resulting tidal waves did a lot of damage all around that ocean on our world, despite our having physical and energy defenses against them. Both events could have been worse, fortunately they weren’t. We managed to get all the residents out of the city before it sank. Took a century before we went back to build a new city there. We just call that whole catastrophe Ragnaro. If you want more details, that’s a story for another time.
“Your planet has seen somewhat similar kinds of events, even though those were far smaller, off the coast of your Washington State, and will sometime again, although we don’t have any idea when – probably not next week.”
Robert Mariner, a frequent contributor to
socalwritershowcase.com,
specializes in science fiction.