Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Major tsunamis are not common, even more rare are films & photos of them as they hit land. Tsunamis have not only changed the course of human history, the largest of them have caused mass extinctions & redirected evolutionary processes. So I feel some guilt looking past all the death & human suffering, at the phenomenon itself, which is fascinating.
We hear a lot of justifiable complaints from both the left & right about economic & cultural globalization. But the scope of these tsunamis, destruction from a natural geologic event spread across an ocean, two continents, & ten or so nations, demonstrates why globalization is ultimately a step forward for the human race, as difficult & inequitable as these early steps are. These countries had no tsunami monitoring & warning system like as the one ringing the Pacific Ocean. & even if one existed, it would not have helped people near the epicenter in Indonesia or in rural areas thousands of miles away. There have been larger tsunamis over the past half century including a localized wave 1,700 feet high in an isolated part of Alaska. If a volcano in the Canary Island collapses, the East coast of the United States could be hit with a wave 100 feet high. Or in the ocean closer to home. Going back in history, an earthquake & tsunami wiped out Lisbon in 1755. Japan has a long memory of great waves. Entire Mediterranean cities have sunk. A volcano blows up & the sea rushes into the caldera & there's another explosion & out rushes a wall of water. Continents move. Sometimes an asteroid falls into the ocean. Such immense tsunamis will happen. We could experience an event far, far worse than the tsunami of 12/04, caused by a 9.0 earthquake that made the Earth wobble on its axiz, vibrate like a bell, & shaved a fraction of a second off the daily rotation.
The tsunami uncovered landmines in Sri Lanka & the government & the Tamil rebels cannot cooperate to defuse them or even to distribute food & bury the dead. The waves reached the shores of Somalia. The killing in Iraq did not pause in mourning. Our's is still a world of nationalism, tribalism, religious extremism & xenophobia. Genocide happens in front of our eyes like a tsunami we cannot hold back. Someday, the human race is going to face a natural catastrophe of hardly imaginable proportions. It may be something we can prevent, or something we'll just have to endure. But whatever it is, I hope we will face it as a whole planet, not as thousands of squabbling nations & warring tribes.
Those of us educated prior to the discovery of plate tectonics wondered about the obvious jig saw puzzle aspects of the world globe in the classroom; we could see that South America & Africa fit together; the arc of ancient worn mountains extending from the Eastern United States to Scotland; the volcanic ring of fire circling the Pacific Ocean; the oddness of animals in Australia. Common sense evidence without an underlying theory. The basic geology I was taught was unconvincing. In a New York Times op-ed piece,. Simon Winchester looks at something we all know that science cannot yet explain.
Add YOUR comments here
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
We hear a lot of justifiable complaints from both the left & right about economic & cultural globalization. But the scope of these tsunamis, destruction from a natural geologic event spread across an ocean, two continents, & ten or so nations, demonstrates why globalization is ultimately a step forward for the human race, as difficult & inequitable as these early steps are. These countries had no tsunami monitoring & warning system like as the one ringing the Pacific Ocean. & even if one existed, it would not have helped people near the epicenter in Indonesia or in rural areas thousands of miles away. There have been larger tsunamis over the past half century including a localized wave 1,700 feet high in an isolated part of Alaska. If a volcano in the Canary Island collapses, the East coast of the United States could be hit with a wave 100 feet high. Or in the ocean closer to home. Going back in history, an earthquake & tsunami wiped out Lisbon in 1755. Japan has a long memory of great waves. Entire Mediterranean cities have sunk. A volcano blows up & the sea rushes into the caldera & there's another explosion & out rushes a wall of water. Continents move. Sometimes an asteroid falls into the ocean. Such immense tsunamis will happen. We could experience an event far, far worse than the tsunami of 12/04, caused by a 9.0 earthquake that made the Earth wobble on its axiz, vibrate like a bell, & shaved a fraction of a second off the daily rotation.
The tsunami uncovered landmines in Sri Lanka & the government & the Tamil rebels cannot cooperate to defuse them or even to distribute food & bury the dead. The waves reached the shores of Somalia. The killing in Iraq did not pause in mourning. Our's is still a world of nationalism, tribalism, religious extremism & xenophobia. Genocide happens in front of our eyes like a tsunami we cannot hold back. Someday, the human race is going to face a natural catastrophe of hardly imaginable proportions. It may be something we can prevent, or something we'll just have to endure. But whatever it is, I hope we will face it as a whole planet, not as thousands of squabbling nations & warring tribes.
Those of us educated prior to the discovery of plate tectonics wondered about the obvious jig saw puzzle aspects of the world globe in the classroom; we could see that South America & Africa fit together; the arc of ancient worn mountains extending from the Eastern United States to Scotland; the volcanic ring of fire circling the Pacific Ocean; the oddness of animals in Australia. Common sense evidence without an underlying theory. The basic geology I was taught was unconvincing. In a New York Times op-ed piece,. Simon Winchester looks at something we all know that science cannot yet explain.
Add YOUR comments here
