Music History Monday: Shake, Rattle, and Roll

Taylor Swift (born 1989)

Only July 22, 2023 – one year ago today – Taylor Swift (born 1989; she has, according to Forbes, a present net worth of $1.3 billion) literally “shook up” Seattle: her concerts in that city shook the ground with such violence that it registered as a magnitude 2.3 earthquake. (As if to prove that the “Swiftquake” at her first show was no fluke, her second show in Seattle also registered a 2.3 on the Richter Scale.)

Talk about shake, rattle, and roll!

A necessary acknowledgement before kicking things off: as entertainers go, there is no one on the planet who is presently more overexposed than Taylor Swift.

No one, I mean, not even Englebert Humperdinck (born Arnold George Dorsey, 1936) in his prime, heaven bless him.

Yet here I am, seemingly jumping on the Swifty bandwagon, writing about she-who-does-not-need-to-be-spoken-of-ever-again. My reason for doing so has nothing to do with Taylor Swift herself but rather, the nature of the geology on which my house, neighborhood, city, and region of Northern California (NoCal) rests.

“Earthquake Country”: San Francisco, April 1906

I live in what is euphemistically called “earthquake country,” at the edge of where the North American tectonic plate borders the Pacific plate. These plates are moving at approximately the speed of a growing fingernail in opposite directions. The Pacific Plate is moving north; the North American Plate is moving south. The immediate area where the plates meet is called the fault zone or the fracture zone, because the bedrock adjacent to the plates is filled with faults – fractures – where the rock has given way due to the movement of the plates against each other.

Like them or not (and I would hazard to guess that most people and animals do not like them), earthquakes are an almost everyday occurrence up and down the Pacific coast. So like it or not, most folks who live on the fault lines – especially home owners, who have to bolt their homes to the ground using technologies unknown outside of earthquake country, whose families keep survival supplies and have emergency plans in case of a Big One – know more about earthquakes and fault lines than they’d like to.…

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