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Tom Cross | Behind the Lens: “Earthquake Epicenter”

Credit: TomCross

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Earth is dynamic, not just the landscape but also its internal workings. The magnetic poles flip, it bleeds lava, and the crust trembles; it’s a misconception that we are on solid ground. Earthquakes happen frequently. Most of the time we cannot feel them, but occasionally there’s one that really rocks the surface.

Soon after I took on the Grand Canyon in my solo hike, the Earth’s crust had stressed itself out and released enough energy to roll the ground for hundreds of miles. It was a glorious 7.1 magnitude quake, equivalent to the energy of 45 atomic bombs. For whatever reason, earthquakes don’t frighten me. Maybe it was the rocket launches I’ve experienced? Perhaps all the hurricanes? If you’re close enough to a rocket launch in Florida, you can feel the ground shake. It’s definitely a thrill!

One-hundred forty five miles (233 kilometers) away and 5 miles (8 kilometers) in depth, a fault had dislocated in an area called Searles Valley. Luckily, this was within driving distance and the area accessible to me. On a quest for knowledge and to feel the planet’s rhythm once again, I set off to the epicenter using an app of the location. I brought camping gear with me like last time, ready to explore the area and stay the night as close to the epicenter as possible while hoping for a night full of rumbling.

Searles Valley. | Image: Tom Cross

Destruction from the quake was visible on the drive to the epicenter. A small town called Ridgecrest took the brunt of the force because it’s established along the fault. Driving through the town, crews were cutting large sections of road where it had cracked and were completely repaving the area properly rather than just smoothing out the fracture; I was impressed to see them put that much work into a repair. On either side of the road, the ground was noticeably lifted from the rolling shockwave. Homes in the location had freshly collapsed walls, and a gas station had sunken into the ground a few inches, yet it was still pumping gas and collecting payment even though it had no power or water. The store clerk sat outside in a chair turning customers away. Grocery stores were still open but were missing ceiling tiles, and certain aisles were closed for cleaning.

While eating lunch in a store, I felt a bump at the table and the visible water pipes in the ceiling were swaying. Something had slipped off a shelf and shattered glass on the floor. This was one of the many aftershocks that I was pursuing!

A dry lake was as close as I could get to the epicenter. Unusual rock formations made of calcium carbonate called tufa that formed 10,000 years prior when water filled the basin were scattered along the landscape. Now I was walking through them, investigating changes caused by the earthquake and hoping to feel aftershocks in this area. I discovered a crack in the dense tufa and put my fingers inside. Abandoned railroad tracks offered an opportunity to feel the vibration along a great distance, so I lay down on the steel quietly for awhile.

Feeling the quakes on an abandoned railroad. | Image: Tom Cross
The ground split here near the epicenter of the earthquakes. The crack is large enough to stick my fingers inside. | Image: Tom Cross

As night approached, I set up a camera to shoot time-lapse of the Milky Way, parked my vehicle nearby, and put together a sleeping arrangement on the roof. Throughout the night I watched meteors burn up in the atmosphere with the awesome backdrop of our galaxy that’s thousands of light years in visible depth. I thought of the reality that I’m one of many creatures created by the cosmos, floating in a sea of energy swirling around on a rock enveloped in gas we breathe. Life is extraordinary. Where else is it located?

An app on my phone pinged, signaling an earthquake had just occurred, and my spaced out thoughts had come back to the ground. I paid attention to the motion of my vehicle; certainly the rocking could be better felt due to the suspension. For the remainder of the night I allowed my body to sense the silent rumblings of the earth while I’d guess the magnitude. Two minutes after each quake, my phone would ping and display the stats; I’d study them to increase my understanding of the energy I experienced.

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My view of the Milky Way and Jupiter while enjoying the earthquake aftershocks. | Image: Tom Cross

I enjoyed the bumping and rocking while watching the sky rotate above. For the first time, I immersed myself into a dynamic experience of our planet’s movements on the ground and in space. Some of the most incredible locations have been formed by the destructive forces of earthquakes.

In next week’s blog, I take a trip into the nearby snow-capped mountains and witness the beauty created by natural disaster. Stay tuned!

Don’t miss Tom Cross | Behind the Lens

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Lifestyle

Tesla Cybertruck targets job site crews with new Tailgate Utility Track and Bed Gear Box accessory

Tesla launched a $350 tailgate track and a $985 lockable Bed Gear Box for Cybertruck.

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Tesla Cybertruck construction site

Tesla’s Cybertruck team added two more items to the Tesla Shop, targeting job site crews and owners who use the truck bed for actual work rather than just showing it off. The official Cybertruck X account posted the Tailgate Utility Track and the Bed Gear Box within minutes of each other, part of a five item batch that also included a reflective jacket, a spray paint hat and an updated reflective tee.

The Tailgate Utility Track runs $350 and turns the folded down tailgate into another mounting surface. It’s a single aluminum track with a T-slot for sliding accessories and two L-track attachment points, plus two load stops included in the box. The pitch is straightforward: strap down oversized cargo, like lumber or a cooler, that hangs off the back of the bed without it sliding out mid-drive. It bolts onto the existing tailgate and works on every Cybertruck trim.

The Bed Gear Box costs $985 and is a different kind of accessory. It’s a lockable aluminum storage box, 55.78 inches long, 19.8 inches wide and 7.79 inches tall, that mounts to the bed’s L-track rails and comes with two internal bins for smaller items. According to Tesla, at just over 57 pounds empty, it’s meant to stay in place rather than come in and out with each trip, giving owners a factory-fit alternative to loose totes for tools, recovery gear or emergency supplies. Tesla’s listing notes that Long Range and Dual Motor AWD Cybertrucks need the L-Tracks accessory installed separately before the Gear Box will mount, since L-tracks come standard only on certain configurations.

Tesla Cybertruck bed gear box accessory

Tesla Cybertruck bed gear box accessory

Both accessories lean on the idea Tesla has been building toward since Elon Musk first described the Cybertruck’s third-party attachment strategy at the 2023 shareholder meeting, when he said the truck would ship with mounting points so outside companies, and Tesla itself, could keep adding gear without redesigning the bed. That’s the same L-track backbone underneath the tailgate shield and jumpseats Tesla launched last year, and the off-road armor package that arrived through the same X account in 2025.

Owners looking to round out the rest of the L-track ecosystem, cargo dividers, MOLLE panels, bed racks and similar gear, can find a wider range of options through our Cybertruck accessories collection.

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Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years

Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.

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Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.

In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.

The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.

Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.

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This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.

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Police sergeant recounts his Neuralink journey with Elon Musk’s brain chip

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A former Vancouver police sergeant with ALS accounts his journey to become a patient for Elon Musk’s Neuralink wireless brain-computer interface technology.

“I’m texting you from my brain right now.” That was the first message Lee Marten sent after waking up from Neuralink surgery, five hours and one migraine after dozens of threads were stitched into his motor cortex.

Marten, a former Vancouver police sergeant, is one of the first Canadian ALS patients to receive Neuralink’s N1 brain implant, and the 26th recipient overall. He tells his story in a first-person account published by Maclean’s.

Marten recounts how he was a healthy, athletic Vancouver police sergeant until April 2022 when symptoms of muscle twitching and balance loss, were followed by a bad fall that broke his leg. He would eventually be diagnosed with ALS in early 2025 at the age of 47. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that progressively destroys the motor neurons controlling voluntary muscle movement, eventually taking away a patient’s ability to walk, speak, swallow and breathe. There’s no cure, and most patients live two to five years after diagnosis.

He describes the devastation of the diagnosis and how he began preparing for it while connecting with other young ALS patients through a WhatsApp group called Young Guns. Through that group he learned about a Neuralink clinical trial at Toronto Western Hospital and, after a roughly seven-month vetting process (physical assessments, psychiatric evaluation, a final interview with the Neuralink team), was accepted this past April as the trial’s 26th recipient and the first Canadian ALS patient to get the N1 implant. He recounts the May surgery in detail, including the robotic system that stitched 64 threads into his brain, and describes the app, Link, translating his neural signals into cursor control, which he was using within hours of waking up.

Marten walks through what daily use looks like, including weekly “brain training” exercises, a real-time neural-activity display, charging the implant via a beanie-mounted MagSafe charger, and using the implant for emailing, texting, social media, and gaming via a “Magic Box” that connects it to other devices. He also gives brief context on brain-computer interface history and quite candid about Musk, calling him “divisive” but saying he found him “easy to admire.

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The piece closes on a heavier note, with Marten seeking to pursue medical assistance in dying as his symptoms progressed, noting that he’ll be able to communicate his final words to his family through Neuralink rather than facing a silent decline. He expresses hope the data from his case will help future ALS patients, even without a cure in his own lifetime.

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