The Rumbling Earth review: A chronicle of earthquakes in India through the ages

The authors start with a lament about how Earth sciences are barely considered a science subject, ignored in favour of its siblings, namely Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. The book is, if nothing else, a great step to spread Earth Sciences to a larger populace. With the human tendency to build roads and buildings wherever and whenever possible, hustling and bustling across the natural landscapes, creating ways of their own, whether a desert or a mountain range, natural calamities are only becoming more commonplace than they were. The recipe is set. We’ve added the toppings. We might as well learn the culinary arts.

The first section of the book elaborates on the many seismological theories and terminologies. How did our understanding of earthquakes evolve from being considered a divine phenomenon to being understood as something caused by the interaction of tectonic plates? How did the Himalayas form and why do certain regions have frequent earthquakes and volcanoes while others barely witness any? What are the different types of collisions that result in earthquakes? Why and how do earthquakes occur in Stable Continental Regions (SCRs)? The science of the earthquake is dissected in great depth in those first chapters, ensuring you understand the multifaceted factors that go behind these natural calamities.

A handy accompaniment is the many illustrations and images sprinkled throughout. At times, they help in imagining the mechanisms of landmasses, and at others, they highlight the real-world locations in a way that words probably can’t.

Personal and Historical Narratives

Shifting to their personal experiences travelling across the various potential and affected sites, the authors use books, research papers, notes, letters, reports, royal chronicles, eyewitness accounts, newspapers, and memoirs to, in a way, paint the history of earthquakes in the Indian subcontinent through the years. When talking of the 1819 Rann of Kutch earthquake, they write: “The day after the earthquake, the local people woke up to an unbelievable sight. Along the northern fringes of the Rann, they saw a mound that had sprung up during the earthquake. The mound, rising 2-4 m off the ground and stretching from east to west, was a sight to behold.” During the 1950 Assam earthquake, “the shaking lasted four minutes and was so strong that slices of land moved, causing massive landslides and producing vast loads of debris choking the rivers.”

The book is at its best in this section, describing human experiences and tragedies through firsthand accounts. In one case, Ruskin Bond shares the story of his grandfather, a bathtub lover, who’s taking a bath when the 1897 Shillong earthquake strikes. In another, the authors try to estimate the timeline of a tsunami through the chronicles of Ibn Battuta, the renowned Maghrebi traveller, explorer and scholar. What’s trickier when wading through the hundreds and thousands of records and documents of Indian territories is the sheer number of different languages and contexts (even calendars), then translated, and recorded in standard formats. As “ancient monuments serve as archives of damage information,” archaeological groundwork highlights the location and periods of the many Indian earthquakes across centuries.

What Lies Beneath: Preparing for the Future

That leads the way to the last section which poses a question: what next? Most of us aren’t used to the feeling of the ground we stand on shifting beneath us, violent shaking bringing only destruction in its wake. Not just that, those living in the flatlands also lack the basic situational awareness taught to kids and adults in seismically active zones, of what to do when an earthquake strikes, when the walls crumble, and when the buildings collapse.

And yet, as repeated instances have shown, most notably the Killari earthquake in 1993, even the Stable Continental Regions (SCRs) are not safe from earthquakes. Despite scientific advancements, it’s still not possible to accurately predict the happenings of the rumbling earth beneath us. “And now we are in a calm phase. For how long? We don’t know yet, but if the ‘winds are gathering for a storm,’ as some scientists believe, we must be ready and prepared.”

With climatic disasters rising in numbers and proportions worldwide, adapting to this changing world is necessary and urgent. The authors show how a lack of civic and social planning can magnify the impact of the same earthquake in two different locations. When an earthquake-cum-tsunami struck Chile in 2015, “it is remarkable that for a quake of 8.3, the death toll was limited to thirteen — a proof that improved building codes could save human lives. Compare this with what happened during the 2015 magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Nepal. It released four times less energy than the Chilean event but brought down several buildings, including modern constructions. It killed 9,000 people, and more than 6,00,000 structures in Kathmandu and other nearby towns were either damaged or destroyed. Nepal’s laxity in implementing the building code is a major factor that resulted in the massive death toll.”

Finding Better Solutions

The writing, as one might expect from a book of 256 pages with an extensive scope, at times, gets too factual and expository, shifting from one fact to another, creating a textbook-ish reading experience that might detract. While it’s a book largely about the destructive forces of nature, causing massive damage, it has its moments of optimism and wonder, like when the authors write about how the “scenic splendour (of the Shonga-tser Lake in Assam) reminds the visitors of earthquakes’ role in sustaining the natural world — whether in raising the mountains or forming the lakes — where life thrives despite the destruction to built environments.”

When you dedicate your life to a discipline, even one as majestically disastrous as seismology, it’s hard not to be fascinated by its mechanisms. You can see and feel the awe natural calamities evoke, something out of a fantasyland, seas withdrawing, only to strike back, the earth trembling violently, destroying everything in its wake, captured deftly in this manuscript.

“As the geological dictum goes, the past is the key to the future. But the past is easily forgotten. Those who forget history are fated to repeat it,” the authors write. As the threat of the Great Himalayan Earthquake looms in the background, a “product of millions of years of tectonic movements,” but carrying “immense tectonic stresses in their bowels, which must be released,” we need better awareness, better architecture, better city planning, among many other things. While “as of today, there are no models that can predict the time, places and sizes of future earthquakes,” we must rely on what we know and the most probable future scenarios. As the authors conclude, “the answer lies in active collaboration between the vast networks of research institutes, the public and the implementing authorities.” The unfinished planet grumbles and shifts. The recipe is set. Will we learn the recipe? Or will we burn the kitchen?