“Here is not only the wreckage of a glacier, but the ruin of once influential, even unassailable assumptions about time, permanence, or what is ‘here to stay.’ [...] Now, with every upward revisions of climate warming rates, it becomes difficult to assume that anything is ‘here to stay,’ except radioactive waste, micro-plastics, and ‘forever’ chemicals. We are living amid the mounting consequences of believing human actions to be independent of the world of which we are a part. But, as long as we conceive of our task as the staving off of an impending planetary catastrophe, we fail to understand, as Walter Benjamin and many other have said, that the real catastrophe is the perpetuation of the way things are and have been, of all the forms of imperial violence, economic injustice, racial and sexual terror, and ecological ravagement.”
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Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (London: Verso, 2022), 43.
— Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth
A rupture twenty-five kilometers deep beneath the Nazca plate, produced the earthquake, triggering a tsunami that traveled along the
fault at tectonic junctions. The magnitudinous waves spread beneath the coast until making landfall along the shores between Constitución and Concepción. Magnitude is relative power, and its measurement takes into account the energy released at the source. By comparison, intensity is the strength of the shaking produced by the magnitude.