Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Florin Diacu is professor of mathematics and former director of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences at the University of Victoria in Canada. He is the coauthor of Celestial Encounters: The Origins of Chaos and Stability and the coeditor of Classical and Celestial Mechanics: The Recife Lectures (both Princeton).

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"In Megadisasters, Florin Diacu takes the reader on a gripping tour of all the forces of nature that wreak havoc on our species, forcing us all, in the end, to cherish every day that Earth does not manage to kill us."--Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of The Pluto Files

"Like a scientific detective, Diacu presents a riveting account of spine-chilling megadisasters facing our civilization, ranging from abrupt climate change to killer comets and the collapse of the world's financial system. This book held me totally spellbound."--Edward Belbruno, author of Fly Me to the Moon

"Megadisasters tracks the history of our development of knowledge about sudden catastrophes. The book is well conceived and written with considerable clarity. Diacu does a nice job of showing what is predictable and what isn't."--William F. Ruddiman, author of Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate

"This book is timely. The public and even many scientists misunderstand the limits of our ability to predict natural (and some not-so-natural) events. Diacu writes well and effectively integrates the human experience with disasters and provides a historic background for our understanding of a variety of natural phenomena. Megadisasters is a winner."--Grant Heiken, coauthor ofThe Seven Hills of Rome: A Geological Tour of the Eternal City

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"In Megadisasters, Florin Diacu takes the reader on a gripping tour of all the forces of nature that wreak havoc on our species, forcing us all, in the end, to cherish every day that Earth does not manage to kill us."--Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of The Pluto Files

"Like a scientific detective, Diacu presents a riveting account of spine-chilling megadisasters facing our civilization, ranging from abrupt climate change to killer comets and the collapse of the world's financial system. This book held me totally spellbound."--Edward Belbruno, author of Fly Me to the Moon

"Megadisasters tracks the history of our development of knowledge about sudden catastrophes. The book is well conceived and written with considerable clarity. Diacu does a nice job of showing what is predictable and what isn't."--William F. Ruddiman, author of Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate

"This book is timely. The public and even many scientists misunderstand the limits of our ability to predict natural (and some not-so-natural) events. Diacu writes well and effectively integrates the human experience with disasters and provides a historic background for our understanding of a variety of natural phenomena. Megadisasters is a winner."--Grant Heiken, coauthor ofThe Seven Hills of Rome: A Geological Tour of the Eternal City

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Megadisasters

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

Tsunamis

I got outside my hotel, and saw that the ocean was now level with our island. To my horror, a wall of water- boiling, frothing, angry as hell-was bearing straight down at us, and a strange mist that looked like thick fog blocked out the sun. I stopped breathing.... -Dave Lowe, eyewitness to the 26 December 2004 tsunami on the South Ari Atoll in the Maldives

We relate Christmas to happiness, but no holiday can shield us from grief. On the night of 25 December 2004, some breaking news shook North America. A catastrophe had killed thousands of people in Southeast Asia, many foreign tourists among the dead. The number of reported victims was growing by the hour.

The rim of the Indian Ocean had been hit by a tsunami-also known as a tidal wave-a tremendous shift of water that acts like a deluge. Waves of such force are triggered by marine earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions, or by large meteoritic impacts. While in deep waters, tsunamis might pass undetected because of their long and gentle shape. But once the seabed shallows, they swell and invade the shore with a force that may flatten the ground.

I will never forget the images shown on television: the incoming wave, the water rushing through the windows of a restaurant, the old man swept away from the terrace of his hotel, the woman trying to cling to the branch of a palm tree, the father and the child running for their lives, the scream of the desperate mother, the indigenous boy rescuing a blond girl from the flood....

There were many stories, most of which I have forgotten-stories of loss, grief, hope, or happy reunion. But one of them, which I heard months later, stayed with me. It was the tale of a survivor, a story told with inner peace and resignation during a Larry King Live show on CNN. This is what I learned from it.

The Model and the Photographer

Petra Nemcova and Simon Atlee spent their Christmas holiday in Khao Lak, a lavish beach resort in southern Thailand. Petra was a Czech supermodel, and Simon a British photographer. They had fallen in love while he was shooting pictures of her for a fashion magazine. But because they traveled on different assignments, they hadn't seen much of each other during the past few months.

This vacation had been Petra's idea. She found Thailand amazing-a country with wonderful people, soothing climate, and breathtaking landscapes. The trip was meant to be a surprise for Simon, so she told him about it only shortly before their departure.

Christmas Day went by peacefully. They tanned on the beach and talked about marriage and children. The wedding date was something they had still to set. After dinner they went to their room to watch White Christmas, the 1950s' musical comedy with Bing Crosby, Danny Kay, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera Ellen. Petra had not seen the movie before, and Simon thought she would like it.

The next morning they woke up early. Their stay at this orchid resort had come to an end, and they wanted to get ready for departure. But first they had breakfast and took a walk along the beach. On returning, Petra started packing. Simon went for a shower. Then tragedy hit with almost no warning.

Through the balcony window Petra saw people running away from the beach. They were screaming in panic as if a noisy marine monster were following them.

"What's happening?!" Simon shouted from the bathroom.

"I don't know! An earthquake or something!"

Seconds later the glass window broke. In no time, the tsunami blew up their bungalow and swept them away.

"Petra!! Petra!!" Simon cried.

"Catch the roof!" Petra called out before she was pulled under a swirl of dirty water.

Debris hit her, tore off her clothes, and she felt a strong pain in her pelvis. When she resurfaced, Simon was nowhere to be seen. Then the wave covered her again.

She thought she would die. Hope revived when she came close to a palm tree, but her attempts to cling to it failed. Luckily another tree appeared in her way, and with great effort she grabbed one of its branches. Although debris hit her repeatedly, assailing her naked, battered body, she clung to the trunk. Desperate voices could be heard from neighboring trees.

As the first shock receded, Petra thought of Simon. He was a good swimmer, so she hoped that he had made it to a safe spot. She prayed for him, and she prayed that the tree holding her would stand the force of the stream.

Time passed. Petra often had the illusion that this was just a nightmare from which she would awake soon, but the pain brought her back to reality. Although she felt very tired and her arms had grown numb, she knew that she had to stay put. Between ocean and sky, her life hung in the balance.

Eight hours later, two courageous Thai men rescued her. They had to handle her carefully because every move made her cry. She would go through a lot of pain in the days to come. Fortunately the immediate danger had passed. She spent several weeks in a Thai hospital with internal injuries and a shattered pelvis, and she needed several months to recover completely.

But Petra never saw Simon again. Some human remains found in March 2005 were identified as his. He met the fate of the more than 200,000 people who happened to be in the path of destruction on that godforsaken day. The saddest part of the story is that most of those lives could have been saved.

How It Happened

On 26 December at 6:58 AM local time, an earthquake shook the Indian Ocean, off the Indonesian coast of northern Sumatra, 250 kilometers southeast of Banda Aceh. Initial estimates put its magnitude at 9.0. The shock was felt as far as the Bay of Bengal. The earthquake occurred between the India and Burma plates as the former shifted beneath the latter, raising the ocean's bottom by 10 meters in some places. This event triggered a tsunami, which hit the beaches bordering the Indian Ocean in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Somalia, Myanmar, the Maldives, Mauritius, Malaysia, Tanzania, Seychelles, Kenya, and Bangladesh (fig. 1.1.). No tsunami ever has claimed so many lives.

Some scientists flew to Indonesia to learn more about the cause of the disaster. Others began to analyze the data. Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reported that a shift of mass toward Earth's center caused the planet to move one millionth of a second faster and tilted its axis at the poles by an inch. Seismologists Seth Stein and Emile Okal of Northwestern University claimed later that the earthquake had been much larger than initially thought, namely, 9.3 on the moment-magnitude scale, for which a one-point increase corresponds to about a thirtyfold effect.

Such reevaluations are not unusual. The rupture zone had been bigger than reported, the initial estimates ignoring the slower shifts along the fault. To extract these data, Stein and Okal relied on theoretical results they had developed three decades earlier with Robert Geller, now a professor at the University of Tokyo.

Shortly after the earthquake, Sumatra's coast was hit by a wall of water higher than the coconut palms lining its beaches; the tsunami, however, traveled almost two hours before reaching Thailand, India, and Sri...