Good (and Bad) Vibrations

Good (and Bad) Vibrations

    The cover story in this month's issue of Discover deals with the research going on in our national parks, from geyers (over half of the world's geyers have been destroyed) to demolishing dams and tracking the sediment flows (in the case of the Elwha River in Washington state, the amount of mud released measured 21 million cubic feet).  As the article mentions: ...even the national parks, which enjoy the highest level of protection in the world, are not immune to human impact.  In fact, much of what we know about climate change's effects on ecosystems comes from research within park borders.  Human impact?  You may recall the Boy Scout leaders (since removed) toppling the balancing "hoodoo" rock, centuries old, and laughing about it on their Facebook post (they received probation but no jail time or fines).  Multiply such damage a thousand fold and you have the battle our parks are facing, from changing the course of river runoffs in the Everglades to massive fires.  But what struck me about the article, however, was the study going on near the area my wife and I had just visited, an area I mentioned as having a frozen sea of salt beneath its delicate formations, that of Arches National Park.

Delicate Arch in Winter:  Copyright © 2016 ProTrails

    A team led by geologist Jeffrey Moore is placing delicate engineering sensors to pick up the vibrational signatures of arches throughout the park.  With the collapse of the famous Wall Arch in 2008, his team hopes to discover just how the arches react to different seismic and other low-frequency vibrations, even something as sensitive as the movement of the "frozen" salt under the park.  Says the article: Moore measures how the arches vibrate to the background shaking of the Earth caused by natural processes like wind and distant ocean tides to arrive at a vibrational signature for each arch.  With this baseline established, scientists can determine whether a recent event --an earthquake or a new fracking operation, for instance-- has changed the arch's vibrational characteristics and, consequently, its mechanical composition.  The arches are like geologic harp strings, always moving and responding to events near and far, but scientists are now close to creating a better tool for understanding when one might snap.

    Interesting, you might say.  But in the state of Utah (where Arches is located), fracking operations are moving ahead (one is already in operation), part of a drive by the governor and legislature to create revenue near federal lands (so far, the state's efforts to claim federal lands as state property has failed and is predicted by one law professor to have no chance on gaining mineral rights should their efforts succeed, making the acquisition a moot point).  The use of thumpers nearby the park, trucks using large hydraulic pads to send a sound wave deep into the ground, have been underway since 2002, some as close as 4 miles from Delicate Arch.  From Louisiana's Department of Natural Resources: Seismic surveys use vibration (induced by an explosive charge or sound generating equipment) to provide a picture of subterranean rock formations at depth, often as deep as 30,000 feet below ground level (BGL).  This is accomplished by generating sound waves downward into the earth's crust which reflect off various boundaries between different rock strata.  On land, the sound waves are generated by small explosive charges embedded in the ground or by vibrator trucks, sometimes referred to as thumpers which shake the ground with hydraulically driven metal pads.  The human ear can barely hear the thump, but the frequency generated penetrates the earth's crust.  The echoes are detected by electronic devices called geophones which receive the reflected sound waves and the data are recorded on magnetic tape which is printed to produce a two-dimensional graphic illustrating the subsurface geology.*

    Have the seismic surveys been slowly contributing to a changing vibrational pattern in the park and elsewhere?  Indeed, some speculation is that our bodies, indeed our world, operates on vibrations of differing levels.  In fact, there are conferences devoted to the effects of vibration on the human body, as presented in a paper by the Center for Disease Control (CDC).  Books have been written about stimulants such as caffeine and alcohol disrupting the vibrational pattern in our bodies, the theory being that by slowing or "tuning" our vibrations to its proper frequency, we can attain a higher mental state (thought to be done by meditation, among other things, those practicing such methods eliminating distractions and elements that would alter the vibration pattern).  On a more physical scale, one can witness such full-force stoppage in boxing or American football when slow-motion footage shows the resulting distribution of the impact and its resulting vibration traveling to other parts of the body (long a practice of physical therapy, the correlation of muscle groups aids in how such therapy is given). 

    The geology of Arches National Park is an interesting one, as described in a video summing up 3.5 million years of canyon and arch creation by the park's site (those of you wanting a quick lesson in this area's geology).  Says the Wiki site: Although the park's terrain appears rugged and durable, it is the exact opposite.  More than 700,000 visitors each year threaten the fragile high desert ecosystem.  The problem lies within the soil's crust which is composed of cyanobacteria, algae, fungi, and lichens that grow in the dusty parts of the park.  Factors that make Arches National Park sensitive to visitor damage include: semiarid region, and the scarce, unpredictable rainfall, lack of deep freezing, and lack of plant litter which results in soils that have both a low resistance to, and slow recovery from, compressional forces such as foot traffic.  Methods of indicating effects on the soil are cytophobic soil crust index, measuring of water infiltration, and t-tests that are used to compare the values from the undisturbed and disturbed areas.

    So much geologic talk, all measuring time in scales we cannot comprehend.  If you've watched the recent Star Wars and imagined traveling at light speed, think again...100,000 years of travel at light speed gets you to the edge of only our galaxy (this video will give you a better picture of that distance).  So what's the point?  Perhaps we have far more to learn that we can see, even if staring at what we think is a frozen sand arch, one locked in time.  Perhaps there are indeed vibrations, hidden intensities and frequencies we've yet to discover, perhaps some moving too fast for us to track, and other moving too slow for us to imagine.  Perhaps if we do jump off of the merry-go-round for even a moment or two, we can glimpse another world happening, a world vibrating to a different tune.  It might be years or centuries away, or right in front of our faces.  Perhaps, just as it is with ashes to ashes, it might be sand to sand, each grain building and yet vibrating away before our eyes.



*An interesting reflection of the environmental vs. the resource usage debate comes from an article in The Zephyr from 2005, the author once being a part-time ranger in Arches National Park.