Word: seismicity
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Robinson follows the rigid conventions of historical melodrama. The land he describes contains no skinny women or frail men: all sexual union is of seismic intensity, heroes rise to wealth and power but pay with fearsome personal tragedy. Once these are accepted-and they are not really much harder to swallow than Moliere's convention that all husbands are cuckolds, or Homer's that all heroes above the rank of lieutenant colonel enjoy godly guidance -Robinson's book is entertaining enough. Obviously the author, who wrote a much-admired exegesis of Finnegans Wake (with Joseph Campbell...
...When the currents vary, they put strains on the crust, which slips ponderously along lines of weakness called fault lines. The magnified result of such slips can be devastating to humans and their buildings on the earth's surface. Transferred to the sea, the giant push creates huge seismic waves...
...small mountains sank out of sight, a 25-mile stretch of high ground dropped 1,000 feet, and new lakes were formed. Volcanic ash rose 23,000 ft. into the sky. Seismic waves washed away 630 of the 800 citizens of the fishing village of Queilen. In the inferno of lava, smoke, fire, water, avalanche and death, the helpless victims first scurried around in panic, then subsided into resigned silence. They worked feverishly to claw the dead and injured from the rubble...
Drowned Coastlines. Then, on seismic waves of deceptively quiet water, Chile's tragedy spread across the Pacific. Traveling as fast as 520 m.p.h. but separated as much as 100 miles from crest to crest, the waves met incoming ships so gently that they merely slowed them down. But when the waves hit land, they caused an unruly violence that varied according to the slope of a shore, the shelter of a peninsula or the degree of warning...
...force of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was 8.3, and that of the worst quake on record, the one in Assam, India, in 1950, was 8.7. -In the wake of the seismic wave, the Philippines' main island of Luzon was swamped by an 18-hour downpour caused by Tropical Storm Lucille. In the floods that followed, 108 were drowned and 150 were missing...