1 Off Gladstone, the reef lies rather more than 125 miles from shore, and when in May 1770, Captain James Cook swept his tough little barque HMS Endeavour into the temptingly smooth waters inshore, he little knew he was entering a nearly fatal ship trap. For the reef crept closer and closer to shore as he and his crew slid ever farther north—until his ship slammed hard into a coral spike and stuck fast, holed and half wrecked. Superhuman efforts managed to warp the vessel off the razor-sharp coralline rocks; and Cook limped into a river mouth where the settlement of Cooktown now stands. Aboriginals on the hills watched him and his wounded vessel; probably they would not care that he named the headland off which he nearly foundered Cape Tribulation.
2 But not all. A few atmospheric scientists continue to question the link between climate change and reef destruction. They point in particular to Cuba’s pristine and well-managed, highly regulated coral reefs, and suggest that elsewhere local threats, especially in countries with less regulation, are the more likely culprits.
3 There are still stirrings of life to be found in Hawaii’s many independence movements, and once in a while the leaders of these groups, all firmly committed to peaceful demonstration, take control of a government building or two to remind outsiders who it is that properly owns the islands. Lately the Chinese have shown a vague interest in offering them support. Each time the American government offers aid or weaponry to Taiwan—which China dearly wants back in its own fold—suggestions are offered in Beijing that China should similarly help the Hawaiian nationalists. Just now the exchanges are lighthearted, few taking them seriously. Just Chinese mischief-making, most likely.
4 The Hawaiian Islands were for many years the extinction capital of the Pacific, since mankind had imported so many cats, dogs, rats, and mongooses that land and seabird populations were being savagely reduced. A recent experiment in throwing a half-mile-long rat-proof fence across the neck of Ka’ena Point, at the very western tip of Oahu, has resulted in an explosion of new life, and the return in particular of large numbers of breeding pairs of the once-rare Laysan albatross. As with the short-tailed albatross in Japan, the experiment has shown that with effort and imagination, some of the damage done by man can occasionally be reversed.
5 One of the first Japanese to live in America, Nakahama Manjiro, was wrecked on Torishima in 1841, only to be rescued by an American whaling boat and taken to New Bedford, Massachusetts—where he went to an American school, learned English, and eventually returned to Japan to act as interpreter during the country’s reluctant opening up to the West. He was probably the first Japanese to take a train or ride in a steam-powered ship, or to take part in the California gold rush.
6 The calms here so slow down ships that, on passage through them, many sailors worked out what was called the “dead horse,” the period for which they had been paid wages in advance, so they celebrated by hauling a piñata-like stuffed horse up the mast and then casting it out to sea. Polluting this part of the ocean has a long history.
7 The Kiribatians are not alone. There are calculated to be 12,983 habitable islands in the Pacific Ocean. Were the sea level to rise by three feet, 15 percent of them would be effectively drowned, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Worldwide, a million and change would be displaced.
8 The self-contained electric microgrid that has made UC San Diego a poster child for this fashionable new technology has not been an unqualified success. After a statewide blackout in 2011, it took the microgrid five hours to recover—the city itself took thirteen. Early suggestions that, at a moment like this, a microgrid would prove “an island of light in sea of darkness” were not borne out. Washom is hoping that a similar test on Lana’i, after a decade of further fine-tuning, will be more of a triumph.
[Marzolino/Shutterstock, Inc.]
Chapter 10
OF MASTERS AND COMMANDERS
If you do not know your enemies, nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every battle.
—SUN TZU, The Art of War, 2600 BP
It is essential to the welfare of the whole country that . . . the enemy must be kept not only out of our ports, but far away from our coasts.
—ALFRED THAYER MAHAN, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1890
More than fifteen years separate a pair of highly unanticipated events that took place in the western Pacific. On the face of it, nothing connects the first and the subsequent one. Yet the first, the almighty and highly damaging volcanic eruption in the northern Philippine islands in 1991, with a devastating typhoon thrown in for good measure, was so catastrophic that it certainly played a role in the second, the sighting of a small steel periscope slicing its way through the international waters of the Philippine Sea.
The periscope belonged to a Chinese diesel attack submarine that had crept, stealthily and undetected, to within torpedo range of an American aircraft carrier battle group on routine patrol in the area. Though the official Pentagon inquiries would later concentrate on the alarming embarrassment of the U.S. Navy, with all its sophisticated underwater detection apparatus, having failed to notice the incoming attack vessel, the deeper and initially unanswered question was why this Chinese submarine was in this corner of the Pacific, in what were long assumed to be American waters, by use if not by right.
Before long, Chinese ships of all shapes and sizes began popping up around the western Pacific waters. The sighting of the first periscope on Thursday, October 26, 2006, became a reference marker, the Year Zero for the Chinese navy’s steady and relentless expansion that has continued to this day. And though the link may not be immediately obvious, the expansion originated during the months of volcanic mayhem that got under way in the Philippines fifteen years earlier, on the wet and windy tropical dawn of Saturday, June 15, 1991.
As a global spectacle, the Mount Pinatubo eruption has generally faded from the West’s memory. It was a Ring of Fire event, true. But not that memorable to most—who, instead, more likely call to mind the blast of Mount St. Helens, in May 1980. When asked about earthquakes, they will speak of the ripping apart of Anchorage on Good Friday 1964 or the Loma Prieta quake of 1989, which collapsed a freeway and took down a bridge in San Francisco. And when tsunamis are mentioned, most will remember the unimaginable death toll that spread across the sea from Banda Aceh in Sumatra, on the day after Christmas 2004, or the nuclear-tainted horror show at the Fukushima power station following northern Japan’s powerful undersea earthquake of 2011.
Though Pinatubo was the second-biggest eruption of the century,1 it is generally now no more than the stuff of archives and reference tables. Perhaps this had something to do with the times, which were filled with a general weariness over the all-too-slow exit of President Ferdinand Marcos, his wife, and their cronies, and exasperation that the regimes that followed were unable to achieve much to improve the dire state of Philippine politics, back then quite dominated by corruption and inefficiency. Whatever the reason, the Philippines had become associated more with frustration than fondness—and the eruption of a giant volcano there won less interest and sympathy than it should have.
Yet, as a hinge of history, this one eruption was of rather greater moment than the many other, more lethal seismic events that have lately occurred around the Pacific, because it closed down, abruptly, two of America’s biggest military bases, snatching away a good portion of America’s military authority in the region. At least in this immense part of the world, this knocked the United States very much onto its back foot.
Pinatubo was never a particularly noticeable or interesting mountain. In a country where some of the volcanoes are true classics of the kind—Mount Mayon, a perfectly symmetrical Fuji-like cone a hundred miles farther south, ranks as one of the world’s most beautiful2—Pinatubo was low, lumpy, covered with enough jungle to render it almost invisible, and barely rated as a volcano at all. It had never been known to erupt, and it was generally associated with ill-fortune: the much-loved Philippine president Ramón Magsaysay named hi
s official plane Mt. Pinatubo, and in 1957 it crashed into a hillside, killing him and everyone else on board.
An early clue to possible fresh trouble on the mountain was a big earthquake that rocked central Luzon in July 1990. Locals, members of a hunter-gatherer group called the Ayta, reported gouts of steam pouring from the jungled flanks of Pinatubo; though when the seismologists arrived, they found nothing amiss. The real trouble began in March 1991. The volcano’s ridge seemed suddenly to unzip itself, and scores of small steam vents opened up, hurling curtains of scalding water and ash up into the sky. At the same time, seismographs at the U.S. Geological Survey, which had a formal partnership with the volcanological community in the Philippines, recorded dozens of small tremors in the earth below. A magma body was forming, the geologists concluded: a volcano that had erupted only three times in the previous six thousand years was about to do it again. On June 7, when a cloud of dust and ash mushroomed four miles into the atmosphere, the Philippine government issued a formal warning to evacuate. Pinatubo was about to go mad.
Although the volcano was a scant ninety miles north of Manila, with six million people living cheek by jowl beside it, the Pentagon was fretting because it was dangerously close to two critically important U.S. bases. The U.S. Subic Bay Naval Base was twenty miles away as the crow flies, and Clark Air Base was less than nine miles distant—close enough to be the location of the U.S. Geological Survey’s immense array of seismographs. Should the volcano truly blow its top, then both bases, and the USGS offices, would be directly in its line of fire.
The military stakes were enormous. Clark was the most populous of all American overseas bases: two hundred thirty square miles in extent, with fifteen thousand people living there, and with runways perpetually busy with fighters, huge transport aircraft, bombers carrying nuclear weapons, troop carriers, helicopters. It had been especially busy during the Vietnam War, as the main hub for men and matériel on their way to and from Saigon. Once that conflict had wound down, the base served as a forward operating headquarters for the closing years of the Cold War. Although planes were sent off to existing bases in Alaska and California once the tensions with Moscow abated, the Pentagon still expected to keep the base active as China started to assert its role in the region. But nature had other plans.
The Subic Bay Naval Base was an even more significant operation. Together with its adjoining naval air station, which in its own way was quite as busy as Clark, Subic Bay was about the same size, at more than two hundred sixty square miles. It was principally used as a forward operating base for the U.S. Seventh Fleet, and during the Vietnam War it repaired and resupplied hundreds of vessels and their aircraft.
In 1987 the RAND Corporation, which advises on long-term military planning for the American government, had little doubt as to the strategic value of the two bases: “It would be devastating to regional security if the USA’s relationship with the government in Manila deteriorated to the point where it lost its base access. Without the naval and air facilities at Clark Field and Subic Bay, the ability of the United States to support the defense interests of the ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] countries and others who depend on the security of the sea-lanes would be seriously jeopardized.”
RAND was focused on the frosty relationship that existed then between Washington and Manila. But politics would not be what did in the bases. Instead, it was the power of fast-rising magma and the eruptive explosions that finished off everything.
The official government warnings that the Pinatubo volcano was about to go critical went out on June 7. The Ayta people were the first to move away, a communal decision that served as a reminder that traditional peoples often have folk memories of impending catastrophe. For example, the seldom-contacted Andamanese, aboriginal inhabitants of a chain of islands in the Bay of Bengal, similarly moved to high ground long before the arrival of the 2004 tsunami that killed so many of their less-informed neighbors.
Despite the gathering seismic crisis, about three hundred thousand local inhabitants who lived within a twenty-five-mile radius of the peak stayed put. The commanders of the two bases decided to follow suit, and keep their crews and ships and aircraft where they were, batten down the hatches, and hunker down—at first. But this volcano was not going to settle itself, it seemed, and three days later the USGS officers monitoring their instruments declared that a true cataclysm was about to begin: Clark Base had to be evacuated, and all personnel moved across the country to Subic, where they should be readied to get on warships to be taken as far away as possible as quickly as possible.
On the morning of June 12 (by chance, Philippine Independence Day), seismic matters took their predicted serious turn. The half-solid lava dome, which geologists suspected had built up over the previous months, was suddenly ruptured by the accumulation of millions of tons of gas-charged magma beneath it—and a gigantic cloud of material rocketed up into the sky. It was a crystal clear day; images of the miles-high cloud boiling gray against the vivid blue of the sky were both awe-inspiring and deeply troubling.
The Americans got going. The Pentagon had already named its planned rescue Operation Fiery Vigil, and that got fully under way. All the aircraft had flown safely away from the air base and the naval air station. Streams of military trucks and private cars were taking airmen and civilians down to Subic. Traffic jams extended for miles. Heavily armed U.S. Marines lined the choked highway, in case Marxist rebels operating in the region took the opportunity to stage ambushes. The noontime temperature was well over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and the combination of fear, urgency, and the ever-present sight of the erupting volcano nearby made for a volatile couple of days.
But all progressed smoothly enough. By the time the major eruptions began, Subic Bay had fifteen thousand extra people to feed and house, and thousands of vehicles to park on its docksides. The Seventh Fleet commanders were busily ordering in vessels from wherever nearby they were on patrol: seventeen warships, including the carriers USS Midway and USS Abraham Lincoln, with their respective battle groups, had already been diverted and turned into the bay, ready to collect their unanticipated passengers.
Pinatubo’s final eruption started during the predawn hours of June 15. By this time, the roars of the exploding mountain were almost drowned out by the howl of the gale-force winds from Typhoon Yunya, which happened to strike the island of Luzon at the very moment its great volcano was erupting. The cannonade of millions of tons of ejected material from Pinatubo was believed to have shot twenty miles up into the sky, but no one could see the spectacle because of the thick rain clouds and the swirling thunderstorms. All they saw were lightning storms of an unimaginable intensity, and then thousands of tons of liquid ash pouring down on top of everyone and everything for the entire day, collapsing buildings, making roads impassable, turning rivers into torrents of near-solid mud.
The unexpected eruption of the hitherto peaceable Mount Pinatubo smothered two critical U.S. bases nearby—one of them a navy headquarters—with enough ash and mud to cause their abandonment. The Chinese navy, abhorring the maritime vacuum thus caused, entered the adjoining waters with enthusiasm.* [U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).]
All the seismographs went dead. Everything was pitch dark, Hadean, and terrifying. The skeleton crew who had stayed at Clark to guard sensitive equipment were finally ordered to smash it all and leave as best they could in the remaining heavy vehicles. A very few of the most foolhardy decided to ride the storm out, secure in the central core of the base’s strongest buildings. Everything shook, the noise was frightful, the air almost impossible to breathe.
Then, at about ten thirty that night, the atmospheric pressure returned to normal, the rains stopped, the clouds cleared away, and the eruption gurgled to a full stop. It was over. Nine hundred feet had been erased from the mountaintop,3 hurled out and into the upper atmosphere and then back down to earth, which meant the two bases below had been wrecked, utterly. They were covered in a foot and more of heavy, gray,
and greasy mud. It would take millions of dollars to clean up the bases, and they would be inoperable for years.
The Philippines suffered terribly from the volcano and the typhoon. Ash extended over forty-eight thousand square miles of the islands, wrecking entire villages. Floods had devastated whole valleys. Eight hundred people died, two million were directly affected, eight thousand houses were destroyed. Ten billion tons of magma had been ejected, twenty million tons of acid gases. Pollution was widespread and profound. The republic’s economy, faltering at the best of times, went promptly into a steep nosedive.
As far as the American military bases were concerned, though, the evacuation was a success, a model of efficiency and good organization. And the fast-advancing science of volcanology had also scored its first impressive triumph: the USGS scientists had predicted the eruption of Pinatubo long before it occurred; they got the time of the eruption right and correctly estimated its ultimate severity. Their work had undoubtedly saved lives, possibly in the thousands. Volcanologists could now be counted among the ranks of forecasters, specialists fully able to predict at least one aspect of the earth’s behavior with quite as much reliability as meteorologists predict the atmosphere’s behavior.
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