Trapped underground

If you’re like me and have nightmares about who being trapped underground, you’re not going to want to read this post. It concerns a woman in Iceland who fell into a newly opened crevasse in Iceland and before she could be rescued, the crevassed closed up again. Rescuers dug for 36 hours, and despite making a hole ten metres wide they were never able to find Inger Matsson, a Swedish tourist who fell into the crevasse.

Crevasses are common in Iceland. The fissure was created during a strong but highly localized earthquake in 2009. Iceland sits atop two tectonic plates—the Eurasian and the North American—and these plates are slowly moving away from one another, literally ripping apart the country apart by two to five centimetres a year. All this movement creates crevasses, both in glaciers and in the earth itself. One of the most visible and dramatic crevasses is at Thingvellir, northeast of the capital of Reykjavik, which is large enough to drive cars through.

Fortunately for Icelandic motorists, the Thingvellir crevasse has long been filled in. But in the case of the tourist Matsson, the crevasse opened so rapidly, witnesses reported, that there was no time to evade it. “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said a spokesman for ICE-SAR, the Icelandic search-and-rescue organization.

An earthquake was blamed for the sudden fissure. Iceland can sometimes have more than 100 earthquakes a day. On January 15 of this year, the Iceland Geology website reported 217 quakes just in the Tjörnes Fracture Zone in the sea just north of Iceland. Fortunately, such “earthquake swarms” are usually very small. But large ones, as anywhere, can be highly destructive to Iceland.

What does this have to do with physics and the supernatural? The questions I raise are purely speculative. Where did Inger Matsson go? There is no trace at all of her body in the excavated pit. Witnesses to her disappear recorded a sudden wind when the crevasse opened, that seemed to suck dust into the fissure. During the panic caused by an earthquake, they could easily have been mistaken.

I only offer the question. If there are multiple universes, and they are like bubbles that occasionally touch ours, what would happen is the bubble membrane suddenly ripped?

I hope I never find out. 

As usual, this blog is also in aid of promoting my new novel, Mayhem, which could can read for free on Wattpad or buy at Amazon's Kindle site. If you'd like a free sample for your Kindle, click here.

Ripping

A rip in the earth