Capturing 'Forces of Nature'

You're flying over one of the world's great earthquake faults when the ground gapes open and -- swoop! -- you're inside, shooting through a narrow gap between the two faces of the fault at high speed.

It's a view no human will ever see. But a new IMAX film opening today at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose comes close, with vivid animation that takes viewers into the bowels of a fault about to rupture.

"We try to give the feeling of what that's like at those depths," said Ross Stein, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park and one of three researchers profiled in "Forces of Nature."

"The fault's got all kinds of scrapes and striations and stuff on it, because it keeps moving in the same direction and it's bashing itself into submission and forming smooth surfaces as a result of repeated earthquakes."

The film, 10 years in the making, follows scientists as they investigate three of the Earth's most violent phenomena: earthquakes, volcanoes and tornadoes.

There are dramatic, close-up shots of a volcano erupting on the West Indies island of Montserrat, billowing gas, ash and lava 10 miles into the air; of tornadoes snaking across Midwestern plains; and of the havoc wreaked by the 1999 Izmit earthquake in Turkey, which killed more than 17,000 people and destroyed 20,000 buildings.

Where cameras cannot go, animations take over. One shows how the Earth formed and evolved from a roiling mass of molten rock, 4.5 billion years ago, to a sea-covered planet on which continents slowly emerge. Another follows molten lava as it rises toward an eruption.

Stein, who has been studying earthquakes in Turkey for a dozen years, started working with the film crew about four years ago. The crew, from Graphic Films, had flown into Izmit immediately after the earthquake and spent about $200,000 filming the aftermath, even though it did not have a sponsor to finance the movie.

Eventually the company got some funding from the National Science Foundation and sponsorship from an insurance company. The film was produced by National Geographic, which is also putting out a book and posters for children and a map of natural hazards in North America.

Stein, who has also worked on a number of television documentaries, spent a total of two weeks filming in Turkey.

It's a cumbersome process, he said. The IMAX camera weighs 185 pounds and runs through 1,000 feet of film in two minutes; then the camera must be taken apart and reloaded. And it's so big that the crew had to rip the doors and seats out of the helicopter to fit it in.

Stein said he was pleased with the results.

Because the film is more visual spectacle than documentary, "you can't give it the kind of scientific richness I would like," he said.

But the new animations do provide a unique look at the inner workings of the Earth, Stein said. "In my mind," he said, "if the film is a success, what it will do is inspire people to become interested in science."