The Friday Fillip: Natural Disasters

There are things we can control (we think), and things we cannot. Most natural phenomena, big and small, fall into the latter category — which is to say damn near everything that happens. Sensibly, we avoid the dangerous much of the time and try to adapt when we can’t run away far enough. Ice age coming? Oh bother! That means up stakes, heavy coats, and a few millennia of wandering. That sort of thing. But, as a moment’s thought will confirm, our record of staying out the way of “bad” natural phenomena is, well, less than stellar. We build cities smack on the big fault lines and live at the bottom of smoking volcanoes or on the shores of rivers that flood like clockwork. Can’t happen here. That was then, this is now. We’ll manage somehow. Lightning doesn’t strike twice. Why, it’s almost as if we can’t control the natural phenomenon that is the human mind.

We do seem to be fascinated with things we can’t control, the weather being a prime example — and natural disasters being another. That fascination is made easier to indulge because of the internet, of course, and the news it brings of the contingent nature of life, near and far. With the understanding that these natural disasters damage people and other living things and that this a real and serious matter, I want to take a look at our interest in these events and, particularly, at the way in which the internet feeds our interest.

Perhaps the best illustration of this is the unlikely RSOE EDIS: the Hungarian National Association of Radio Distress-Signalling and Infocommunications (RSOE) Emergency and Disaster Information Service (EDIS). On the site you’ll find a world map simply pulsating with tokens signalling today’s hazards and disasters. These range across a wide spectrum. Thus, just yesterday, for instance, among dozens of other “short time” (very recent? transient?) events, there was: a weather hazard recorded for Jordan Montana, where the temperature fell to minus 41 degrees Celsius; a continuation of the nuclear biohazard at Fukushima, Japan; an earthquake registered in El Guarco Valley, Costa Rica, severity as yet unknown; a severe weather event — a hailstorm in Woolgoolga, Australia; and something called “an event into space” in Greece, which, the last time such a thing was noted back in November, was ultimately explained by RSOE this way:

Meteor falling into the sea at night time in Greece, on the island of Zakynthos to cause panic in citizens but concluded that there was no damage. Greek official news agency ANA-MPA reported, eyewitnesses of the air with a violent explosion that lit up one of the object, like a ball of fire fall very quickly towards the sea, the statement was given.

A more leisurely look at the full range of events contains some surprises, at least so far as I was concerned. There were more than eighty recorded earthquakes yesterday, twenty-two of which measured 4 or more on the Richter scale. And just about twenty “Earth approaching objects” headed our way in the next thirty days. (The worrying one might be 2011 YD29, due on December 27 and scheduled to miss us by a mere 6.1 lunar distances, but fortunately only 20 metres across.)

Want to monitor supervolcanoes? This is the site to get you started. Sadder: the mass death of animals? Here, too. Enough, that is, to occupy anyone who wants convincing that living is something of a risky business.

And a destructive business — as a global map of fires shows. Peering down from its privileged height, NASA has created an animated map of wildfires as they come and go across the seasons and the years. As the notes on the page say, much of the annual flaring in South America and Africa is the result of agricultural fires.

But it’s not only the big stuff that you can see from space that can get you. The microscopic can be dangerous too. Canada, like many countries, posts travel health notices. Currently there’s not much worse than a bunch of the usual “level 1” threats, such as measles in the countries shown on a WHO map; cholera in Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic and Haiti; and chikungunya on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin/Sint Maarten.

If by chance you’d like to stay abreast of these disruptive events around the world, you might subscribe to Global Disaster Watch, a site that can send you daily RSS updates, or to NASA’s RSS feed of “The latest daily Natural Hazards from around the globe”.

Stay safe.