"An Icelandic volcano erupts, spewing forth tons of ash and cloud, blanketing all of Northern Europe and distrupting global air traffic for several days. Thousands of passengers are left fuming, airlines lose millions of dollars with aircraft sitting idle, and the media print hundreds of photos of nature's fury with catchy headlines like 'Pain in the Ash'."
Prior to April 2010, you would have been dismissed as a crackpot for coming up with such an implausible scenario. Barely a year later, after a second eruption in Iceland, and one in Chile, that has disrupted flights from Australia and New Zealand, perhaps the implausible scenario is not so difficult to believe after all! Insurance companies are no doubt starting to raise premiums for trips in areas of volcanic activity, and meteorologists can no longer get away with providing general information about "scattered showers" and "low pressure systems". And for the weary travellers, who had to contend with all manner of disruption to their schedules, news of another natural disaster impacting flights (or trains or ships) is starting to get the same reaction as the latest body scanning technology being deployed at airports.
While humans are the one species on earth that are partly immune to the vagaries of nature, we are still completely at its mercy when something does happen. And the challenge in being able to anticipate events is strongly linked to personal experience - while we have a life span of about 80 years on the planet, usually within a narrow geographic region, nature operates on the scale of millennia. This means that the probability that one would encounter an event like a volcano is remote - two in the space of the same year might be considered almost impossible.
Even for events that are more frequent on a geologic scale, we have this nasty habit of quickly forgetting painful memories. Hurricane Katrina was a tragic event for the city of New Orleans - but there had been hurricanes in the past that had resulted in just as much destruction - and there was always the fear of the "hundred year" event that would threaten the Gulf Coast. A few years later, Hurricane Ike wrecked Galveston with just as much fury - two "hundred year" storms in the space of three. Despite this, and the yearly threat of hurricanes, people will continue to build homes and communities along the coast, taking risks that by now should have been
Perhaps this is a reflection of the innate human optimism that has driven us to explore all corners of the earth and venture as far as the moon - that we can overcome all challenges posed to us, and nature, though merciless, can set us back only so far. Three hundred years of the industrial revolution has given us a feeling of invincibility that no amount of death and destruction will bring a population of 7 billion and counting to its knees. So we learn to live with change, and devise new ways to get around barriers. Each new day brings with it a different experience, which gets appended to the common knowledge of mankind, the mother of all Wikis. And when we invariably forget, and go back to being complacent, Mother Nature is there to throw something else in our direction and watch us scatter.
Prior to April 2010, you would have been dismissed as a crackpot for coming up with such an implausible scenario. Barely a year later, after a second eruption in Iceland, and one in Chile, that has disrupted flights from Australia and New Zealand, perhaps the implausible scenario is not so difficult to believe after all! Insurance companies are no doubt starting to raise premiums for trips in areas of volcanic activity, and meteorologists can no longer get away with providing general information about "scattered showers" and "low pressure systems". And for the weary travellers, who had to contend with all manner of disruption to their schedules, news of another natural disaster impacting flights (or trains or ships) is starting to get the same reaction as the latest body scanning technology being deployed at airports.
While humans are the one species on earth that are partly immune to the vagaries of nature, we are still completely at its mercy when something does happen. And the challenge in being able to anticipate events is strongly linked to personal experience - while we have a life span of about 80 years on the planet, usually within a narrow geographic region, nature operates on the scale of millennia. This means that the probability that one would encounter an event like a volcano is remote - two in the space of the same year might be considered almost impossible.
Even for events that are more frequent on a geologic scale, we have this nasty habit of quickly forgetting painful memories. Hurricane Katrina was a tragic event for the city of New Orleans - but there had been hurricanes in the past that had resulted in just as much destruction - and there was always the fear of the "hundred year" event that would threaten the Gulf Coast. A few years later, Hurricane Ike wrecked Galveston with just as much fury - two "hundred year" storms in the space of three. Despite this, and the yearly threat of hurricanes, people will continue to build homes and communities along the coast, taking risks that by now should have been
Perhaps this is a reflection of the innate human optimism that has driven us to explore all corners of the earth and venture as far as the moon - that we can overcome all challenges posed to us, and nature, though merciless, can set us back only so far. Three hundred years of the industrial revolution has given us a feeling of invincibility that no amount of death and destruction will bring a population of 7 billion and counting to its knees. So we learn to live with change, and devise new ways to get around barriers. Each new day brings with it a different experience, which gets appended to the common knowledge of mankind, the mother of all Wikis. And when we invariably forget, and go back to being complacent, Mother Nature is there to throw something else in our direction and watch us scatter.
