[bushisdamanin04]

It seems that natural disasters, and the scope of the loss, gets greater and greater. Is this fact or fiction? Does anyone have any facts or articles that compare today's natural disasters with those of 20, 50, 100, 200 years ago?

[IonImplantGuru]

Is this fact or fiction? Does anyone have any facts or articles that compare today's natural disasters with those of 20, 50, 100, 200 years ago?

I googled 'greatest disasters' and checked out a few links.

Spanish flu, 1918 - 1919... 20 - 40 million dead.

Yangtze River flood, 1931... 3 - 5 million dead.

So yeah, this tsunami event is horrifying as events unfold; but in the historical scheme of things, not even close.

[Future Useless Eater]

Some of the posts here, and the enormity of the death and destruction from this got me thinking... I wondered if Al Qaeda or the crazy N.K. dictator were to set off an atomic bomb underwater, could they generate the kind of energy that triggered a tsunami like this?

The answer was no, not even close...

Hiroshima Atomic bomb	20,000 tons of TNT
Hydrogen bomb tested 1952	10,000,000 tons of TNT
Mt. St. Helens blast 1980	10,000,000 tons of TNT
9.0 Richter Earthquake	1,000,000,000 tons of TNT

earth.ast.smith.edu/courses/ast220/PPT/group06.ppt