Subject: Jim Berkland The Man Who Predicts Earthquakes.
Part 2. May 15, 2008.
I have been told how to contact Jim Berkland by one
of my friends. I contacted him, he wrote me back
a nice e-mail and I sent him the information about
the toads reqarding the Chinese earthquake.
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When I got to Berkeley in the middle of Spring
semester it turned out that I'd already received all of
the prerequisites for upper division, and there were no
more courses available to me, without taking the
forestry field camp, involved in measuring logs, timber
country, and working in a logging mill. So I said,
well, what does that pay,?
Well, no, they said, you pay us. It costs you $200. I
said, no, next summer I've got to work again. Well,
sorry you can't take any upper division cl***** until
you've had this summer field camp. Well, my buddy was
taking geology at Berkeley, and he said, we don't have
to have our geology field camp until the end of our
senior year. So because all of the prerequisites were
identical I just ****fted right into geology, and never
looked back. After two years at Berkeley I went
directly to the U.S.G.S., where I worked as a
non-professional for almost six years, maybe a little
over, during 1958 to 1964.
David: Had you earned your Ph.D.?
James: No, I just had a bachelors. I thought, well,
I'll just work at the U.S.G.S., work my way up, show
them what I can do, gradually become a geologist, and
go from there.
Well, it turned out, it didn't work that way. To get
with the U.S.G.S. you pretty much had to have a Ph.D.,
except under times of national emergency or something,
when they hired a few people with bachelors during the
uranium boom because they needed feet to go out there
and walk around.
But there was no way that I could advance. I could
have worked as a technician for my whole life there. So
I went back to school, got my master's at San Jose
State, and then just after I'd completed that suddenly
the offers began coming. I could be going to the State
Water department, or Bureau of Reclamation. Then the
U.S.G.S. wanted me possibly to go up on an ice island
by myself for six months, just to make bottom
measurements on arctic ice flow, check their
radioactivity, and atmosphere-- just read instruments
all by myself, until the ice got cold enough in August
or September to freeze up and they could land the
plane.
Well, anyway all these things came down, but I had
made a decision and signed up with the US Bureau of
Reclamation as a professional engineer and geologist. I
worked with them for over five years, in dams, tunnels,
and canals in Oregon and California mainly. At this
time came the revolution in Earth Sciences-- the plate
tech tectonic in evolution. But from all of my courses
through Santa Rosa Junior College, Cal Berkeley, and
San Jose State, plate tectonics was just a figment of
the imagination. It was just coincidental-- that word I
hear all the time-- that it looks like you could fit
South America and Africa together. There's no
mechanism. It's just some wild idea from this German
geographer, who is not even a geologist. So what's he
know about this continental drift?
So it was laughter that was associated with the
theory. My professor would always talk about it, show
the map, and ha ha. You know, there's this idea some
geographer believed, but it really doesn't make any
sense. We'd have to change our whole understanding
geology developed over the last 200 years if we were to
accept this. Well, so be it. But they didn't accept it
until the late 60's after notable conference at
Monterey, where they brought geologists from all around
the world. They now had space-age data, bottom -of -
the-sea data, new fossil data, and it all began to
jive. They realized that we're not all little islands;
everything in it connects at some point. The unified
theory of geology developed at that meeting in 1969.
Well, it was too much for me to avoid anymore. I'd
been getting little glimpses of this from talking to
people, and seeing things in the paper, or the
Geological Society Bulletin. But when I last left the
U.S.G.S. in 1964 they didn't buy it at all. There was
no such thing as continental drift. Movement of the
magnetic pool might explain things, not the movement of
continents- So that also added fuel to my
understanding, with light to my understanding about
seismic windows.
David: How did you get interested-involved in
earthquake prediction?
James: I came out from deciding I wasn't going to
spend the rest of my life back on the east coast, when
all of my previous life was here. I told my wife don't
bother to come back with the little daughter, because
I'm coming back to California. So I came, without a
job.
We'd taken a tour around the country, and after we'd
got back to my mother's place up in Sonoma County,
there was a little postcard from San Jose's County. Mr.
Berkland, if you're still interested in this job you
might come for an interview.
I had flown out to take the orals in February of 73,
by then in June my appointment was over back there, and
they wanted me to come back. I said, no, I'm going back
to California. We had a couple of possibilities, but
they dwindled. And I hadn't heard from the county. So
here's this postcard-- if you're really interested,
call us by August 31st, and this is like September 2nd.
So not to leave any stone unturned I called up the
county engineer, and I said, well, I just back from the
east coast, and I'm available now if that position is
still open. Yeah, c'mon down. I'll prompt you.
So next day I come down and talk to him, and three
days later I'm County Geologist, the first one for
Santa Clara County, the first one in Northern
California ever. They had most of the major counties in
Southern California, and they have their own staff of
County Geologists. But not here, and there was a crying
need for one, because of the geologic hazards, the
landslides and earthquake problems, and subsidence
developing under the Santa Clara Valley. So for the
first few months I was interested- through the
earthquakes I felt, and several others that had been
re****ted to me in the Bay Area-- but not until January
8th. 1974. after I'd been there for six months, did it
all begin to jive.
I saw an article in the newspaper that we might
expect local flooding around the San Francisco Bay due
to an unusual astronomical alignment. I got out my
almanacs. (I've always been an almanac buff.) Say, what
is this? First full moon of the year on January 8th was
on the same day as the closest perigee in about eight
years. And the two events were only an hour and a half
apart. Very unusual for them. What I call
"synchronaity", that close together; between the
syzygy-- the lining up-- and the perigee- closest
approach. That was causing extreme tides. Also, it was
just a week after the closest approach of the earth and
the sun, the perihelia, that happens once a year, in
through January.
So that combination was close to the conditions of
January 4th, 1912, when we had the maximum force in 600
years. This was the maximum force in several years. And
I thought, huh, if the ocean waters are being pulled up
and down by the gravity, and the earth is sort of
rotating underneath the bulge of water and high tide.
Then six hours later it's over here where there's a
deficiency of water, and then six hours later it's down
under here, another bulge. So that's why you have two
high and two low tides a day.
I didn't understand all that, really. I didn't have
the geometry that clear. In fact, I wasn't really sure
what the difference between a new moon and full moon
was. All I knew was they were lined up. The clearest
analogy is that if the moon is rising just as the sun
is setting, that's when you have the full face of the
moon lit up. like the sun's a big flashlight. So you
see the full moon, but if the moon is up here at the
zenith, when the sun is rising or setting, it's obvious
you don't see the whole face of the moon. You can only
see the part that's near the moon.
So that's full moon. When the moon rises and the
sun's setting, that's best you can do. And you might
even get an eclipse, and that's a perfect syzygy. I
love the solar eclipse. I've seen three, and I expect
to see another one in February of 98. I went down to
the Galapagos Islands, and up into the Caribbean. It'll
be a beautiful total eclipse, lasting over four
minutes. We saw the ones in Mexico in 91, and I flew
down to Peru in 94 and saw the one there. The first one
I saw with my daughter back in 79, with the last one to
hit the United States, 48 states. There won't be
another one here until 2017. I hope I'm still here.
David: How did you notice that the association
between this and earthquakes?
James: Okay, so I said, hey if that's causing the
ocean tides to go up, maybe the solid earth has a tide
in it. Indeed it does, about three feet.
Part 2.
John Winston. johnfw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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