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The sand cliffs of Florencia Bay.
1. Signatures in Soil and Stone
IT IS a cool morning in early spring, and I’m down on Florencia Bay. Word is quietly spreading in town that glass balls—hollow glass floats once used on Japanese fishing nets—have been washing in on local beaches. I suspect I’ve arrived too late to find one. The die-hard hunters will have been out long before sunrise, some sporting headlamps and conducting their search on bikes.
Glass float treasures or not, I take beach walks for the sheer mind-and-body pleasure of it. On this day, only a few other people are around. They slip into view and fade out again, veiled in the morning’s soft mist. I look for bits of beach glass, weathered shards of glass in teal green or beer-bottle brown, whose surfaces have been frosted and edges smoothed by years of tumbling in water and sand. When it comes to gifts from the sea, I am easy to please. A prize bit of beach glass or an unusual rock (preferably with a good story attached) will do every time.
Jack Martin appreciated unusual rocks, too. Martin and his wife, Phyllis, lived at Long Beach in the 1960s right up until the national park was established. Their house, built just above the beach, was known for its hand-hewn timbers, portholes, and a wall of floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows with half-inch thick panes that Jack had salvaged from an old Seattle hotel.
While they were still in the process of building the house, Jack took a fancy to a concretion on the beach at Florencia Bay. The naturally formed and perfectly rounded sandstone ball with its pockmarked surface was so big that an adult could not encircle it with both arms. To residents of the area, the “meteorite” was a well-known feature at the bay.
Martin thought this notable rock would look nice in his yard. Once, when Phyllis was away on a trip, he went to work with an excavator, cutting a rough road down to the beach. There, he scooped up the rock, transported it back up the hill, and proudly positioned it at the end of his driveway. When Phyllis returned a few weeks later, she was not impressed that their home had gained a “moon rock” but still lacked windows.
After the national park came into being, the concretion was retrieved and installed briefly at the naturalist’s office before again being moved to the top of the cliffs above Florencia Bay for everyone to see and appreciate. There it might have stayed for many decades more, except that in January 2009 it was stolen and tipped off the bluff above Green Point. While the culprits showed a modicum of consideration (leaving money at the site during the heist, presumably to cover the cost of the two gate locks they cut to reach the rock), they never did come forward. To this day, the details of the Great Concretion Heist—who, how, and why—remain unsolved.
The concretion’s three journeys back and forth from Florencia Bay to Long Beach were, of course, only the most recent trips in its history. Concretions are hard balls of sandstone, created when sediments build up around a nucleus such as shell and ultimately become cemented together, forming a rock. This concretion may have first travelled to Florencia Bay packed into one of the great sheets of ice that covered North America tens of thousands of years ago. Here, it was part of the load of till dropped as the ice sheet melted, which is now exposed in the sandy cliffs rising above the bay. Over time, as the wind, rain, and waves scraped away the softer material from around this geological curiosity, the exposed concretion finally fell out of the cliff to the beach below. There it may have stayed but for the intervention of a man and his excavator.
Foundations
Two hundred million years ago, Long Beach didn’t exist. Nor did the land mass occupied today by British Columbia. Back then, the edge of the North American continent was close to what is now the British Columbia–Alberta border. Just as most of the people who come to Long Beach are visitors from other regions, the rock here is also “from away.” Much of British Columbia is a mélange of sorts, a mish-mash of sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks that originated in distant latitudes.
The province’s geological underpinnings are linked to the activities of the tectonic plates, the great slabs of Earth’s lithosphere (outer layer) that fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Sediments have always run off the continent, flushed by rain and carried by rivers to the sea. As the oceanic plate subducts beneath the continent, the action scrapes these accumulated sediments off the sea floor, fusing them to the plates’ leading edges. Any volcanic islands carried atop the oceanic plates also become joined to the continental plates in this way. Each island and slab of rock “accreted” onto the continent is called a terrane.
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Like a patchwork quilt, British Columbia is a colourful geological aggregate of exotic terranes, each with its own origin and composition. Long Beach is part of the Pacific Rim Terrane.
About 100 million years ago, a chain of volcanic islands collided with the ancient edge of the continent. This terrane of exotic rock, called Wrangellia, forms much of Vancouver Island as well as Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) and parts of British Columbia’s mainland.
The rock under Long Beach, however, is different from that which formed the rest of Wrangellia. The section of the coast between Tofino and Ucluelet is part of the Pacific Rim Terrane, which adhered to Wrangellia about 55 million years ago. It’s a sliver of a terrane, snuggled up to Vancouver Island only on the Ucluelet–Long Beach–Tofino stretch, on the outer edge of Vargas Island, and down near Port Renfrew and Victoria. The Pacific Rim Terrane is a mélange of the sand, gravel, silt, limestone, and volcanic rocks deposited on the ocean floor between 150 and 200 million years ago. All of these are visible in the twisted, buckled rocks of the outcrops along the west coast shoreline.
Nature’s Sculpting
About seventeen thousand years ago, at the height of the last ice age, only the highest mountains on Vancouver Island would have poked above the thick cap of ice. Today these peaks are jagged and sharp, noticeably different from the lower mountains near Long Beach that were smoothed over by ice, such as Vargas Cone and Radar Hill.
As the ice first expanded and then receded, it sculpted the landscape into the forms visible throughout the area today. Deep gouging carved the narrow, snaking fjords of Clayoquot Sound and Alberni Inlet. These were further shaped by the erosive forces of water flowing down the river valleys. The retreating ice also left behind mountainous loads of glacial till, a mixture of mud, clay, sand, gravel, and pebbles. At Long Beach, these large-scale “till drops” can be seen in the towering sand cliffs, studded with stones like raisins in a baked cake, that rise above sections of Florencia and Wickaninnish Bays. Over thousands of years, waves and winds sorted the till so that today we have the extensive mudflats on one side of the Esowista Peninsula and the series of sandy beaches on the outer coast.
The Long Beach area is part of the Estevan Lowland, a narrow strip of shoreline that stretches about 290 kilometres (180 miles) along Vancouver Island’s southwest coast. In most locations, the lowland is less than 3 kilometres (2 miles) wide and has few dramatic topographical features or landmarks. Nevertheless, the area’s stunning beaches—really, more like one stunning beach punctuated by rocky headlands and stretching almost from Tofino to Ucluelet—seems a fair trade for the subdued landscape.
Sand extending far back into the forests above many local beaches also reveals the history of the ice age on this coast. The height and shape of the shoreline have changed over time in response to changes in sea level and to the rise and fall of the island’s land mass. Most recently, as the kilometres-thick ice melted and drained into the ocean, the sea level rose. So, too, did the unburdened land lift, gradually rising as its frozen mantle got smaller and finally disappeared.
At one site not far from Long Beach, archaeologists have determined that sea levels during the Holocene Epoch (which began about 12,000 years ago) were at least 10 metres (30 feet) below where they are today. Then, from about 6,000 to 4,800 years ago, sea levels rose to about 3 to 4 metres (10 to 13 feet) above the existing shoreline before falling again to present-day levels. Further proof of this constant flux and recalibrating of sea level over time is evident at the base of Radar Hill, just northwest of Long Beach. There, evidence of an old shoreline shows that sea level was once 15 metres (50 feet) higher than it is today.
This extremely slow, non-stop adjustment of land continues. By this time next year, the west coast of Vancouver Island will have risen by about one millimetre, while the whole of the island will have been nudged about a centimetre northward.
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Much of the land near Long Beach is a low coastal plain. Expansive mudflats predominate in the calm, inner waters sheltered by the Esowista Peninsula. Sand and cobble beaches are found on the outer, exposed, and “high-energy” shorelines.
When the Earth Moves
The west coast of Vancouver Island is the most seismically active place in Canada. Every once in a while, earthquakes and tremors near or far remind us that living on a low coastal plain exposes us to all the whims of the Pacific Rim’s tectonic restlessness. Tsunami warnings and earthquake preparedness are the stuff of our lives.
This was the case on March 11, 2011, when a magnitude 9.0 earthquake rocked eastern Japan. Within hours, all of the Long Beach area’s communities were officially on tsunami watch. The Provincial Emergency Program called the warning, as did officials in other countries rimming the Pacific. West coast communities had not been so alert to an earthquake and tsunami warning for years. Park beaches were closed, as was the high school in Ucluelet because school buses delivering students from Tofino would have been passing Long Beach close to the time of any expected waves. The waves never did arrive, and the only impact detected was unusually strong currents in the harbours. However, even a small wave generated by the quake could have made an impact on such a low-lying peninsula—essentially a flat plain with an average elevation of less than twenty-five metres (eighty-two feet). In an area where many people live at sea level, even a rise of a foot or two is worth paying attention to, particularly if the tsunami occurs at high tide.
In recent memory we’ve been spared an assault by a monster tsunami but, as geologists and the odds tell us, we’re in line for a big wave or two. Oral histories and geological clues tell us they have hit before.
LIVING ON RESTLESS SHORES
Not far offshore from Long Beach is the point where two tectonic plates converge. The denser Juan de Fuca plate sits lower, covered by ocean, and the North American continental plate floats like a giant raft. These two plates meet at the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where the Juan de Fuca plate is forced downward, subducting beneath the continental plate, sliding under it at an annual rate of two to five centimetres (one to two inches).
Although in this area we experience many low-magnitude earthquakes caused by complex forces acting within the crustal plates, the much more catastrophic events are earthquakes that deform the crust. These happen when the plates lock together. Tremendous pressure builds until the plates abruptly unlock, causing the crust to jerk upward. Such “megathrust” earthquakes occur only along subduction zones, just like the one off the west coast of Vancouver Island. They are the strongest earthquakes in the world, striking every three hundred to eight hundred years or so. A 1964 earthquake in Alaska was the largest recorded in North America, with a magnitude of 9.2. Even larger was the Chilean earthquake of 1960, which, at magnitude 9.5, remains the largest earthquake ever recorded.
Two earthquakes strong enough to make the list of Canada’s top ten earthquakes in the last century have rocked the Long Beach region. On December 6, 1918, a magnitude 7 earthquake shook Mike Hamilton awake. He was north of Long Beach, at Ahousat on Flores Island, helping build a school for the Presbyterian Church. The work crew slept in the partially completed building. When the quake struck at 12:41 A.M., the men waited in terror as the structure rattled, fully expecting to be crushed in their beds. At nearby Hesquiat, missionary Father Charles Moser recorded the same event in his diary: “I thought the end of the world was here.”
Three decades later, on June 23, 1946, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake shook the Vancouver Island town of Courtenay. In communities closest to the epicentre, 75 percent of homes lost their chimneys. Up the coast from Long Beach, at Estevan Light, lighthouse keepers scrambled to cope with chaos. At the time, the lighthouse lens floated upon a vat of mercury. News accounts reported that the quake jarred several of the lens prisms loose and knocked more than four hundred kilograms (nine hundred pounds) of mercury out of the bath. One can only imagine what it took to contain quivery blobs of that much toxic mercury rolling around the tower’s floors like ball bearings. As far away as Victoria water mains broke, buildings were damaged, and the recording mechanism on the city’s seismograph (an instrument for measuring earthquakes) dislodged. Nearer to Long Beach, the captain of the MV Uchuck, plying the Alberni Canal, experienced a series of “long, gently-sinusoidal swells” that were so out of the ordinary he thought the engine’s tail shaft was broken.
THE GREATEST WAVE
The sinusoidal waves the Uchuck surfed down were the ocean’s response to the earthquake. When tectonic plates shift, some- times dropping a metre or more in seconds, the water above the seabed shifts to fill the void. This rapid movement of such a colossal amount of water produces a tsunami, or earthquake-generated wave (often erroneously called a “tidal wave”). Depending on where the waves are initiated and in which direction they move, the result can vary from a negligible rise that only the finest of instruments can detect to a devastating surge like the Indian Ocean tsunami that struck on Boxing Day 2004.
Over three hundred years ago, on January 26, 1700, Canada’s west coast experienced a catastrophic earthquake at the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The quake and its tandem wave of destruction are preserved in both the oral history and geological record of the area. According to stories told through generations, Chief Louie Clamhouse of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation recounted the devastation that the 1700 quake wrought at Pachena Bay, just down the coast from Long Beach:
It was at nighttime that the land shook... [People] simply had no time to get hold of canoes, no time to get awake... It is said no one ever knew what happened. I think a big wave smashed into the beach. The Pachena Bay people were lost.
The tidal flats near Long Beach provide their own record of that quake’s tsunami. When abrupt changes in sea level occur and large wave events result, they leave a “signature” in the sand and soil sediments. The powerful surge of water floods the land with a slurry of seawater, mud, sand, and debris. These deposits trap pollen and other plant and animal remains, which scientists analyze to find out the approximate date for the change in the soil profile. Studies like this conducted in the mudflats near Tofino show evidence of a tsunami about three hundred years ago—evidence that fits with the oral history of the Huu-ay-aht people, as well as with written accounts from Japan of a tsunami striking at several sites along its coast on January 27, 1700.
THE TSUNAMI OF 1964
On Good Friday 1964, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake occurred 120 kilometres (75 miles) east of Anchorage, Alaska. Deep below the earth’s surface, the North American plate suddenly detached from the oceanic Pacific plate and lurched seaward, setting everything above it into a rattling frenzy for 4 minutes. The sudden motion deformed the crust, uplifting some sections as high as 9 metres (30 feet) and generating a prodigious tsunami that swept across the Pacific Ocean at velocities reaching 830 kilometres (515 miles) per hour, as fast as a commercial jet. Within 16 hours it had reached Antarctica. The tsunami killed 119 people, including 12 as far south from Alaska as Crescent City, California.
Geography dictated how the tsunami acted on Vancouver Island’s west coast when it arrived less than 5 hours after the quake. When the giant open-ocean-fed swell of water arrived at Alberni Inlet, it ploughed in through the kilometre-wide opening and squeezed up the 40-kilometre- (25-mile-) long fjord, gathering size and momentum. Stopped in its tracks at the inlet’s head, the debris-loaded wave surged into Port Alberni, knocking houses off their foundations, flipping cars, ripping boats from their moorings, and derailing a loaded freight train. More than 250 buildings were damaged, 60 extensively. Incredibly, no life was lost in the chaos of that night, but the clean-up was long, muddy, and expensive.
Although Port Alberni received most of the press coverage in British Columbia, other communities were affected by the tsunami, too. One was Hot Springs village in northern Clayoquot Sound. In quick succession, three waves hit the village during the night. Several houses torn from their foundations floated into the bay and began to burn, ignited by tipped lanterns. Against a dark sky lit up by the flaming homes, residents clambered into boats and hurried from house to house ensuring everyone was safe, all the while negotiating whirlpools and bobbing stumps, logs, and other debris. No lives were lost there either, but damage was so great that the entire village was later relocated. In Tofino, the waves’ ferocity left the municipal water line between the village and the water source on Meares Island twisted and broken on the mudflats. The anchors and chains securing village docks had been lifted and knocked askew. In Ucluelet, a log boom snapped apart, filling the inlet with logs that battered pilings out from under several wharfs. Townspeople remember the peculiar quiet that fell momentarily before each wave arrived and the roar that followed as the wall of water flooded past and over islets and smashed into the bays.
Out at Long Beach that night, resort owner Neil Buckle arrived home late after visiting his wife in hospital, where she had given birth to their first child. Awakened by crashing and rumbling, he looked out a window to see his Dodge truck awash in a tangle of logs and brush. By Neil’s reckoning, the water flowed up Sandhill Creek beside the resort for well over a kilometre before pouring back down bearing logs, branches, and stumps. “I could see it in the moonlight,” he recalled later. “The waves were as high as the room.”
And So We Wait
Although dramatic and memorable, tsunamis that impart the damage of the 1964 earthquake are statistically rare. Of the forty-three tsunamis registered by the Tofino tide gauge between 1906 and 1981, for example, only two resulted in waves higher than a metre. One was the 2.4-metre (7.9-foot) wave measured after Alaska’s 1964 earthquake, and the other, a 1.26-metre (4.13-foot) wave, was recorded after the massive earthquake in Chile in 1960.
Still, earthquakes and tsunami risks come with the territory here. Threat of the “big one” looms in the background, but most residents don’t dwell on it other than putting together (or thinking about putting together) a home earthquake kit. Local emergency preparedness crews have a more focused attitude about all of this, working hard to remind the rest of us of the shaky ground on which we live.
Imagine living in a place where the ground beneath your feet could shift and buckle at any moment, where the potential for a wave to sweep your home away is not just Hollywood fiction, and where geological reference points shift constantly, if infinitesimally, every day. Welcome to Long Beach. Life on the edge, indeed.