| QUAKELAND On the Road to America's Next Devastating Earthquake Kathryn Miles New York: Dutton, August 2017 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-525-95518-4 | ||||
| ISBN-10 525-95518-6 | 356pp. | HC | $28.00 | |
| Page 23: | "...Smith spends most of his time at his ancestral home in Grand Teton National Park, where his forebearers homesteaded for generations." |
| Spelling: S/B "forebears". |
| Pages 24-25: | "And what they found excited even the taciturn Smith: Since those benchmarks had been installed, the entire caldera had risen about a meter. In scientific terms, that's a really big deal. Smith still gets excited by it. 'I learned to fly an air force jet in 1963. A year later, I drove a dog team across Antarctica. Neither held a candle to that discovery,' says Smith today." |
| Capitalization: S/B "Air Force". Also, I would rate those two activities more exciting than the scientific discovery Smith touts, impressive as it is. Although it's in Montana, it isn't exactly Zephram Cochran's warp drive breakthrough. |
| Page 32: | "...—just like when we hear a sonic boom as a jet flies overhead." |
| Of course, the jet has to be supersonic. No passenger planes are these days, and few fighters go supersonic over populated areas. |
| Page 35: | "Ironically, the occupants of the Painters' original campsite were complete unharmed by the catastrophe." |
| Grammar: S/B "completely". |
| Page 39: | "An M 6.0 quake is ten times stronger than an M 5.0 quake and releases thirty-one times more energy. In other words, that 5.0 quake will release the energy equivalent of 4 million pounds of dynamite. The 6.0 quake is more like 4 billion pounds—making its energy release on par with the Little Boy nuclear bomb." |
| Factual error: Little Boy was the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Its yield is imprecisely known, but lies in the range of 15 to 30 kilotons of TNT — far below the 4 billion pounds (or 2 million tons) that the author quotes. |
| Page 52: | "I find a clear sign of a scarp just behind the Kokopelli's Koffee there." |
| This reads like the preceding sentence has gone missing. |
| Page 64: | "...each a chapter in the narrative that is our earth's history." |
| Capitalization: S/B "our Earth's history". |
| Page 74: | "The nations were still very much at loggerheads when the Hebgen Lake quake ruptured." |
| Usage: S/B "the Hebgen Lake quake erupted" (or "occurred", or "took place", or "struck".) |
| Page 78: | "Out at sea, the captain of the brig Alice felt a heavy lurch that threw him and his crew, followed by a shaking that lasted nearly a minute." |
| How is this possible in a ship at sea? |
| Page 80: | "Each time that occurred, the land currently known as the Mid-Atlantic underwent an accordion effect..." |
| Another discontinuity like the one on page 52. The preceding paragraph gives no clue as to what "that" might be. |
| Page 118: | "And the force of the collision was so traumatic that it created Himalaya-like mountain chains running through what is now the eastern United States." |
| Usage: S/B "dramatic" or "forceful" (among other possibilities.) Trauma implies physical or psychological injury. |
| Page 186: | "About 500 years ago, the area that is now Oklahoma was first inundated by a shallow ocean." |
| Factual error: S/B "500 million years ago". |
| Page 209: | "And the force of the collision was so traumatic that it created Himalaya-like mountain chains running through what is now the eastern United States." |
| Usage: S/B "dramatic" or "forceful" (among other possibilities.) Trauma implies physical or psychological injury. |
| Page 209: | "Halihan also has a seismometer. When I first met him, it was stationed in his backyard, near a pond overflowing with turtles. His son and I fed them one evening. We'd scatter what looked dog kibble over the surface, then wait for the reptiles to arrive." |
| Missing word: S/B "what looked like dog kibble". |
| Page 217: | "Collectively, they are the single largest concentration of oil on the planet." |
| Larger than the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?. |
| Page 222: | "But Denver wasn't so lucky. The quakes produced by the Rocky Mountain Arsenal continued until 1981—fifteen years after pumping ceased." |
| Elsewhere the author says 20 years. |
| Page 252: | "Following the 2016 quake, the Taiwanese government conducted an extensive study of soils on the island." |
| Number error: S/B "soil" because the next sentence refers to "soils" with the pronoun "it" in two places. |
| Page 269: | "It also accelerated our orbit that day, shaving 1.8 microseconds off the day." |
| Factual error: S/B "Earth's revolution". |
| Page 274: | "We got there in his brand-new Corvette (bloodred)..." |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "(blood-red)". |
| Page 282: | "Yamaguchi squeezes into the backseat, rearranging the books and life jackets and things..." |
| Missing space: S/B "back seat". |
| Page 2285: | "Atwater kept searching estuaries up and down the coast and found remarkably similar evidence. In between the peaty layers of mud and sediment, they also found sand." |
| This looks like the third instance of a missing sentence. Otherwise, who besides Atwater is doing the searching and finding? |
| Page 289: | "Because these waves meet such little resistance in the open ocean, their energy is disbursed such that they can seem hardly noticeable to boaters there." |
| Word choice: S/B "dispersed". |
| Page 351: | "Central United States Earthquake Consortium (CUSEC), 123, 125" |
| Index error: S/B "123, 125, 144". |
| Page 351: | "Charleston Chamber of Commerce, none" |
| Index error: S/B "145" (although Karen Teeter, its executive director, is correctly indexed on this page.) |
| Page 354: | "Northridge quake, CA (1994), 246, 258, 279" |
| Index error: S/B "247, 258, 279". |
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