Lost Time in Amatrice

Early on the morning of August 24th, I woke from a deep sleep to the awareness of an eerie, low-frequency roar, as if the landscape around me were exhaling some primordial word. For the previous three weeks, I had been teaching a field course for undergraduate geology students in the east-central Apennines, living in an old stone house in an Italian village that is now a scientific campus. When the earth began to shake, my mind was almost painfully divided between fear and fascination. I noted the passage of the various seismic phases, which travel at different speeds from the source. The rumbling P-waves were followed immediately by the stronger and more complex S-waves. Their near-simultaneous arrival—like a thunderclap heard close to the time of a lightning strike—meant that the epicenter was not far away. Later, my colleagues and I learned that it was close to the town of Amatrice, fifty miles to the south of us.