Forces of nature
"When that many human beings die-at the hands of terrorists or nature-you've got to show that this matters to you, that you care."
Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
On Sunday December 26, at 6:26 a.m. an earthquake registering 8.9 on the Richter scale struck off the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
The Indonesian quake occurred just three days after an 8.1 quake along the ocean floor between Australia and Antarctica caused buildings to shake hundreds of miles away, although it did not cause any damage. Quakes reaching a magnitude of eight are very rare.
Without warning
Normally, seismologists reckon that an earthquake of magnitude eight releases energy equivalent to six million tons of TNT. For every step up the scale, the energy released is increased by a factor of 32, so a magnitude nine quake would be equivalent to more than 190 million tons of TNT.
The earthquake hit at 6:26 a.m.-the tsunami came as much as two-and-a-half hours later, without warning, on a morning of clear blue skies.
At 7:30 a.m. the Indian Air Force Chief, S. Krishnaswamy, was informed that one of the remote bases on Car Nicobar Island had been flooded. He waited until 8:15 a.m. before he asked an assistant to alert the Defence Ministry.
Quite independently, the Indian Metrological Department sent out a warning fax at 8:54 a.m. but to the wrong person, as the government had changed in May and they had not updated their records. They sent out another fax at 9:41 a.m. to the home ministry disaster control room and the Cabinet Secretariat was informed at 10:30 a.m.
Scientists at the United States Geological Survey tried frantically to get a warning to the emergency authorities in countries in the path of the wave, but to no avail. In the absence of any established warning network, this was hardly unexpected. People within coastal communities simply needed to move a kilometer or so inland or to climb 20-30m above sea level. Such action in Sri Lanka and southern India, where the waves took over an hour and a half to reach, could have been possible.
An international warning system was started in 1965, the year after tsunamis associated with a magnitude 9.2 tremor struck Alaska, but India and Sri Lanka had ruled out effecting such a system because of cost and the fact that they had never been hit by a tsunami.
Ignoring the signals
None of the countries affected issued a warning and an unnamed member of the Thai meteorological department admitted that a tsunami alert was not issued for fear of hurting the country's important tourism industry, in case it turned out to be a false alarm.
Kerry Sieh, Professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology, had been studying the region for nearly a decade and 10 years ago he installed monitors on islands off Sumatra.
Last July he became so concerned that a large quake was due that he printed and distributed 5,000 posters and brochures around some of the islands. He addressed church congregations and schools to tell people what to do and his main advice was for people to live away from shorelines. He and his team bypassed national and local governments as their warnings were totally ignored.
Two weeks before the quake occurred, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, he expressed his concern that a large earthquake and tsunami were overdue in the region.
As we all now know the tsunami affected Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Malaysia, the Maldives and Burma, among other countries. It devastated villages on the northern Somali coastline, more than 6,000km from the epicenter, crossed into the Pacific Ocean and was recorded in New Zealand and along the west coast of South and North America.
Markets remain calm
As the days passed the death count mounted with horrifying momentum.
Yet the stock markets of the world were unaffected. In Indonesia and India they hit all-time highs in that week and even in Sri Lanka, more comprehensively affected, the main index lost only five percent. Economic analysts said that, although India was one of worst-affected countries in terms of deaths, the economic impact of the disaster would be minimal. This was confirmed by the insurance companies, who said their losses would be a fraction of the claims caused by the hurricanes in Florida.
This natural disaster, on a scale not seen for generations, will be remembered for the generosity of spirit of the common man. The public response has shamed and alarmed most governments. As the numbers of dead and missing reached the level of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, the common citizen donated amounts that confounded even the most optimistic of predictions and on Thursday, January 6 the whole of Europe observed a three-minute silence in memory of the tens of thousands who died in the natural disaster.
Market storm
When men slaughter the innocents of a different race, culture or religion, most of us are unconcerned as we are not directly affected and are unconsciously partisan.
It takes a force outside of ourselves and our control, a dispassionate and final arbiter, to wreak havoc and destruction of the innocents before we affirm our common humanity.
Nature is one such force and the natural laws of the market are its offspring. Batten down the hatches and prepare for the effects of the 'economic tsunami'.
The first quake occurred in 2000. Since then the waves have abated. Yet the forces that wreak havoc and change have already been unleashed. With the start of the New Year the Dow Jones Industrial Average has closed lower in the last six sessions, losing 185 points in the first three sessions of 2005. That is the blue-chip average's longest losing streak since July 2002. But that is only one small current.
Others are there just waiting to be noticed and, as Kerry Sieh pointed out, historically, such events have occurred in clusters: "There is some evidence that the stresses on the tectonic plates south of the epicentre may now have increased and raised the chances of another major earthquake."
There are large active faults in China, Taiwan, Turkey, Greece and the granddaddy of them all at San Andreas, California.
This year will be remembered as one in which nature and the natural laws of the market reasserted their dominance over the self-importance and self-delusion of man and his artificial financial instruments. Cycles repeat.
Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
On Sunday December 26, at 6:26 a.m. an earthquake registering 8.9 on the Richter scale struck off the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
The Indonesian quake occurred just three days after an 8.1 quake along the ocean floor between Australia and Antarctica caused buildings to shake hundreds of miles away, although it did not cause any damage. Quakes reaching a magnitude of eight are very rare.
Without warning
Normally, seismologists reckon that an earthquake of magnitude eight releases energy equivalent to six million tons of TNT. For every step up the scale, the energy released is increased by a factor of 32, so a magnitude nine quake would be equivalent to more than 190 million tons of TNT.
The earthquake hit at 6:26 a.m.-the tsunami came as much as two-and-a-half hours later, without warning, on a morning of clear blue skies.
At 7:30 a.m. the Indian Air Force Chief, S. Krishnaswamy, was informed that one of the remote bases on Car Nicobar Island had been flooded. He waited until 8:15 a.m. before he asked an assistant to alert the Defence Ministry.
Quite independently, the Indian Metrological Department sent out a warning fax at 8:54 a.m. but to the wrong person, as the government had changed in May and they had not updated their records. They sent out another fax at 9:41 a.m. to the home ministry disaster control room and the Cabinet Secretariat was informed at 10:30 a.m.
Scientists at the United States Geological Survey tried frantically to get a warning to the emergency authorities in countries in the path of the wave, but to no avail. In the absence of any established warning network, this was hardly unexpected. People within coastal communities simply needed to move a kilometer or so inland or to climb 20-30m above sea level. Such action in Sri Lanka and southern India, where the waves took over an hour and a half to reach, could have been possible.
An international warning system was started in 1965, the year after tsunamis associated with a magnitude 9.2 tremor struck Alaska, but India and Sri Lanka had ruled out effecting such a system because of cost and the fact that they had never been hit by a tsunami.
Ignoring the signals
None of the countries affected issued a warning and an unnamed member of the Thai meteorological department admitted that a tsunami alert was not issued for fear of hurting the country's important tourism industry, in case it turned out to be a false alarm.
Kerry Sieh, Professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology, had been studying the region for nearly a decade and 10 years ago he installed monitors on islands off Sumatra.
Last July he became so concerned that a large quake was due that he printed and distributed 5,000 posters and brochures around some of the islands. He addressed church congregations and schools to tell people what to do and his main advice was for people to live away from shorelines. He and his team bypassed national and local governments as their warnings were totally ignored.
Two weeks before the quake occurred, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, he expressed his concern that a large earthquake and tsunami were overdue in the region.
As we all now know the tsunami affected Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Malaysia, the Maldives and Burma, among other countries. It devastated villages on the northern Somali coastline, more than 6,000km from the epicenter, crossed into the Pacific Ocean and was recorded in New Zealand and along the west coast of South and North America.
Markets remain calm
As the days passed the death count mounted with horrifying momentum.
Yet the stock markets of the world were unaffected. In Indonesia and India they hit all-time highs in that week and even in Sri Lanka, more comprehensively affected, the main index lost only five percent. Economic analysts said that, although India was one of worst-affected countries in terms of deaths, the economic impact of the disaster would be minimal. This was confirmed by the insurance companies, who said their losses would be a fraction of the claims caused by the hurricanes in Florida.
This natural disaster, on a scale not seen for generations, will be remembered for the generosity of spirit of the common man. The public response has shamed and alarmed most governments. As the numbers of dead and missing reached the level of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, the common citizen donated amounts that confounded even the most optimistic of predictions and on Thursday, January 6 the whole of Europe observed a three-minute silence in memory of the tens of thousands who died in the natural disaster.
Market storm
When men slaughter the innocents of a different race, culture or religion, most of us are unconcerned as we are not directly affected and are unconsciously partisan.
It takes a force outside of ourselves and our control, a dispassionate and final arbiter, to wreak havoc and destruction of the innocents before we affirm our common humanity.
Nature is one such force and the natural laws of the market are its offspring. Batten down the hatches and prepare for the effects of the 'economic tsunami'.
The first quake occurred in 2000. Since then the waves have abated. Yet the forces that wreak havoc and change have already been unleashed. With the start of the New Year the Dow Jones Industrial Average has closed lower in the last six sessions, losing 185 points in the first three sessions of 2005. That is the blue-chip average's longest losing streak since July 2002. But that is only one small current.
Others are there just waiting to be noticed and, as Kerry Sieh pointed out, historically, such events have occurred in clusters: "There is some evidence that the stresses on the tectonic plates south of the epicentre may now have increased and raised the chances of another major earthquake."
There are large active faults in China, Taiwan, Turkey, Greece and the granddaddy of them all at San Andreas, California.
This year will be remembered as one in which nature and the natural laws of the market reasserted their dominance over the self-importance and self-delusion of man and his artificial financial instruments. Cycles repeat.
