If you enjoy a really good scare, think about Trump in the Oval Office while you’re reading!
Natural disasters are called “natural” for a reason. They If you enjoy a really good scare, think about Trump in the Oval Office while you’re reading!
Natural disasters are called “natural” for a reason. They happen. It’s a fact of life and, as seismologist Lucy Jones repeatedly warns us, they’re not a matter of “if”. It’s always “when” and “how big”. She also acerbically cautions us, if you think you’re ready for the “big one”, then you can be assured that nature is very capable of dumping something on you that is far more massive, terrifying and damaging than you could possibly plan for within the constraints of political reality and limited human resources.
Although there’s enough technical information in Lucy Jones’ master work to whet the whistle of any natural science geek who wants to know the difference between a vertical fault and a sub-horizontal fault or why tsunamis inevitably follow sub-oceanic earthquakes, The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (And What We Can Do About Them) is not first and foremost a book on seismology, hydraulic engineering or volcanology. It is a compelling essay on the sociology and the history of natural disasters – how we shape our lives in the ever present likelihood of disasters and how we have modified ourselves, our cities, our lives and our culture after “the big ones” happen to us.
The Big Ones will fascinate you with the awe-inspiring stories of 11 of the most destructive and devastating natural disasters in human history that will leave you as breathless as the most compelling suspense thriller you’ve ever read – the 1755 earthquake that leveled Lisbon and its subsequent re-construction under the powerful leadership of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, whose exemplary skills could be used to define statesmanship; the bald-faced, shameless deceit of the Hoover Republicans in 1929 when they repudiated every campaign promise made or implied to the black community after the Mississippi floods of 1927; the drowning and near bankruptcy of the state of California in the devastating floods of 1861, floods that most Americans have never even heard of; the stagnant and still incomplete recovery from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina caused by the compounded effects of systemic racism, incompetence, poor planning, and graft and corruption at every government level; the near impossible cascade of black swan events that caused the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, a nuclear meltdown whose magnitude and resulting devastation eclipsed even Chernobyl.
The Big Ones is an informative masterpiece that, despite its theme, closes with a carefully tempered feeling of optimism that we are learning and we are getting better at dealing with that which is impossible to avoid. On the other hand, we know that when Yosemite decides it’s time to erupt, the jig is up!
The 1783 eruption of Laki in Iceland is one of the world’s great unsung natural disasters. With the aid of stratYosemite's turn is coming! Be patient!
The 1783 eruption of Laki in Iceland is one of the world’s great unsung natural disasters. With the aid of stratospheric weather and wind patterns over a period of eight months following Laki’s first eruption, a toxic cocktail of ash, fluorine, sulphur and other poisonous chemicals that had been propelled to the upper reaches of earth’s atmosphere, was spread over much of the northern hemisphere throughout the world. While the direct death toll in Iceland resulting from the eruption was only 9,300 poor souls, estimates of the number of fatalities world wide range as high as a staggering 6,000,000 deaths. The causes of these deaths ranged from famine and drought, hypothermia and heat stroke, bronchitis, asthma, emphysema, and other respiratory ailments to fluorine poisoning and even more bizarre maladies such as suffocation by carbon dioxide. In Egypt, for example, the monsoons failed and the critical resulting annual Nile flood failed to occur. It has been estimated that as much as one-sixth of Egypt’s population at the time expired during the resulting famine. As explosive power goes, Laki was a mere child compared to overgrown monsters such as Mt St Helens, Vesuvius, Tambora or Krakatau but, when it came to tallying the body count, Laki was most definitely world class and, arguably, a possible world champion. Island on Fire does a brilliant job of explaining the science behind how this disparity arose (On a lighter note, Witze and Kanipe observed that it could have been worse. Laki did not result in any pyroclastic flows, torrential landslides or mudflows, flash flooding due to glacial melting, significant earthquakes or tsunamis).
While Witze and Kanipe explore the lives of the people who lived through that event such as Jón Steingrímsson, the pastor who witnessed the events at close hand and did such a superb job recording them for posterity, the emphasis in Island on Fire is definitely the science of volcanoes – their distribution around the world, their development, their eruption and the promulgation of their effects locally and around the world. There is even a rather grotesque chapter on the almost bewildering variety of ways in which unsuspecting, unlucky bystanders can be killed by a volcano.
It is no mean feat for a writer to make popular science or history compulsively readable (think Dava Sobel, Simon Singh, Carl Sagan, Pierre Berton, Simon Winchester or Martin Dugard, for example). Witze and Kanipe made Island on Fire eminently readable, interesting and lushly informative. But, for me, they just missed clearing that final hurdle to make the book a compelling page-turner. That said, I’ll withhold one star out of five but happily recommend it with both thumbs up to any potential reader who wants to increase their knowledge of the earth, where it’s been and where we might be headed. If we’re here when Yosemite blows, at least we’ll die happily knowing that we understand what’s going on!
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