This NYT piece talks about why natural disasters of the future will be even more catastrophic than the Dec. 26 earthquake-triggered tsunamis.
An excerpt:
N seven hours last week, great ocean waves scoured shores from Thailand to Somalia, exacting a terrible price in wealth and human lives. But unimaginable as it may seem, future catastrophes may be far grimmer. Many more such disasters - from earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, to floods, mudslides and droughts - are likely to devastate countries already hard hit by poverty and political turmoil.
The world has already seen a sharp increase in such "natural" disasters - from about 100 per year in the early 1960's to as many as 500 per year by the early 2000's, said Daniel Sarewitz, a professor of science and society at Arizona State University. But it is not that earthquakes and tsunamis and other such calamities have become stronger or more frequent. What has changed is where people live and how they live there, say many experts who study the physics of such events or the human responses to their aftermath.
As new technology allows, or as poverty demands, rich and poor alike have pushed into soggy floodplains or drought-ridden deserts, built on impossibly steep slopes, and created vast, fragile cities along fault lines that tremble with alarming frequency.
In that sense, catastrophes are as much the result of human choices as they are of geology or hydrology. Dr. Kerry Sieh, a veteran seismologist at the California Institute of Technology, has spent years studying some of the world's wealthiest and poorest earthquake-prone territory - not only the sickle-shaped scar of faults off Sumatra's west coast that caused last week's tsunami, but also California's San Andreas fault, which could, with a sudden twitch, submerge the inhabitants of some of the most valuable land on Earth.
The difference between the rich and poor countries, Dr. Sieh said, was that the rich ones had improved their building techniques and their political systems to deal with inevitable disasters.