 What's the most unexpected result of the disaster?
It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. Specifically, a dust volcano? "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory.
 Even though millions of lives were lost, the economy is now booming due to the sea.
 Because of the new sea, there are no more rivers to trade by.  Even though millions of lives were lost, the economy is now booming due to the sea.  Coast-to-coast travel via buses and trucks is now a thing of the past.  Many of the previous states have dissolved.