Biggest earthquake in 40 years hits Southeast Asia - Part 2

[Chemical Ollie]

Some dude had fun with Photoshop



The official death toll now exceeds 175 000.

The number of Swedish missing has decreased to about 900, far from the 2-3000 possible deaths previously reported.

[Dis]

there's a band called 50 foot wave

http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Musi....ap/index.html

reminds me of that rap album that came out after 9/11 that showed the rappers destorying the world trade center.

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Berzerker
Btw, Indonesia is now upping its death toll to 210,000. That brings the total up to around 270,000, the 5th worst disaster in thel ast 3 centuries.

Just out of morbid curiosity, what are the others?

I can't think of any natural disasters in that magnitude over the last three centuries. The Lisbon earthquake killed on 50,000, but it is memorable because so many people were killed when their churches collapsed. Karatoa, maybe?

Man-made catatrophies don't match up. The Dresden bombing killed IIRC 135,000 -- more than either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs. The firebombing of Toyko is in that range too. The Battle of the Somme was something like 50,000-60,000.

[Dis]

spanish flu maybe. that's not a natural disaster though, but a disease.

[Ned]

My sister assures me that this is a real photo.

[Buck Birdseed]

That's laughably clearly photoshopped. The scale of the wave is all wrong, for one.

[Hurricane]

Originally posted by Ned
My sister assures me that this is a real photo.

Uhh, tell your sister she needs to be a bit more critical.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/tsunami/tsunami2.asp

[Dis]

from what I understand it wasn't a tidal wave that high as in that photo. If it were that high there would be no survivors.

Most areas it did not exceed 1 story (10 feet). It was only those who couldn't reach higher ground that were killed. Which sadly were most of them because higher ground could not quickly be attained.

and taking scientific fact from sisters.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Zkribbler


Just out of morbid curiosity, what are the others?

I can't think of any natural disasters in that magnitude over the last three centuries. The Lisbon earthquake killed on 50,000, but it is memorable because so many people were killed when their churches collapsed. Karatoa, maybe?

Tangshan Earthquake in China, 1976- over 250 000 officially dead.

The Kanto Tokyo-Yokohama Earthquake in 1923, in which nearly 150 000 died.

Can't remember how many were reported dead in the Tashkent Earthquake.

[Boris Godunov]

IIRC, there was an earthquake in China that killed ~800,000 people, but that may have been more than 3 centuries ago...I'm thinking 16th or 17th century.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Zkribbler




Man-made catatrophies don't match up. The Dresden bombing killed IIRC 135,000 -- more than either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs.

Wrong place for this really, but what you seem to be relying on are David Irving's fictitious accounts. The figures given by civil authorities in Dresden at the time do not go over 40 000.

Considerably less than Irving's grotesquely inflated account which relied on forged documents, Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry and misattributions.

To give you an idea of what his aim was, he estimated that only 25 000 people, 'perhaps', were deliberately killed by the Nazis over a period of four years in Auschwitz.

He also claimed that the Allies (on no evidence whatsoever as far as anyone can tell) were responsible for the deaths of Jews and camp victims taken on the death marches, because supposedly, these victims were conveniently taken into Dresden(!) and other cities and towns to be killed in the bombing raids.

[JohnT]

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a endowment of $27 billion:

Statistics*

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[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
Man-made catatrophies don't match up. The Dresden bombing killed IIRC 135,000 -- more than either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs. The firebombing of Toyko is in that range too. The Battle of the Somme was something like 50,000-60,000.

The Battle of Verdun in WWI killed a million people, IIRC. Man-made or easily preventable famines kill millions, such as in the USSR, China, and most of the Third World.

[JohnT]

The Battle of Verdun in WWI killed a million people, IIRC.

That figure is a little exaggerated.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/battles.htm#Verdun

The above link gives casualty figures for the 51 most deadly battles of the 20th century... Verdun ranks 12th.

#1? Leningrad, with up to 2 million soldiers and civilians perishing.

[molly bloom]

' Drought

Of all natural disasters, drought is by far the most feared. When the rains do not come, crops are not planted and food supplies dwindle. The effects of this can be devastating. Between 1899-1901, about 15% of the population of Gujarat in western India died from famine. Estimates of 10 million in Bengal in a famine in 1770, 800,00 in Uttar Pradesh in 1836, and one million in Orissa in 1865-66 are just a few examples of the damage drought can have.'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/feature..._impacts.shtml


'A hundred years later, the same class of people were largely responsible for the great Bengal Famine in 1943, in which an estimated 1.5 million to 3 million people perished. As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen explains in his now well-known theory of entitlements, the Bengal famine was not the result of a drastic slump in food production but because the colonial masters had diverted food for other commercial purposes. '

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GM-freefoodaid.php

[Ned]

John T, the problem with your measure is that the casualties took place over years. The question should be, what event in history cost the most human life in one day.

[JohnT]

T'wasn't my measure ( ), and I only posted that in reply to Che's assertion of a million killed in Verdun and not as part of the larger discussion.

[Bosh]

Originally posted by Ned
John T, the problem with your measure is that the casualties took place over years. The question should be, what event in history cost the most human life in one day.

Well as far as %'s go there was a volcanic eruption way way back in the Stone Age that killed off easily the majority of the human population (from mitochondrial DNA analysis its believed that we are all descended from only a handful of females who survived it and were able to reporduce.

[Ned]

Bosko, handful? In the whole world?

[chequita guevara]

Bosko's a drink.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Ned
Bosko, handful? In the whole world?

The volcano Krakatoa explodes with disturbing regularity, about every 150 years. With some of it's more massive explosions, it's put enough particiluate matter into the atmosphere to lower temperatures globally. An eruption in 550AD is believed to be responsible for the fall of Justinian's Empire, as well as the Olmec and others, and caused famine througout much of the world.

There is evidence of a catastrophic volcanic eruption that basically caused a global winter.

[Bosh]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Bosko's a drink.

Wha?????


Ned: Look here http://www.andaman.org/book/app-r/ch...eck/textr5.htm

It was the Toba volcano about 75,000 I believe, at least that's what my ecology prof told me in college.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Boshko

Wha?????

You've never heard of Bosko? Can't seem to find it on google, but I seem to remember a canned drink called Bosko that was like Yoohoo.

[Bosh]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


You've never heard of Bosko? Can't seem to find it on google, but I seem to remember a canned drink called Bosko that was like Yoohoo.

Never heard of it. I thought Bosko was a cartoon character.

[Jon Miller]

I haven't done anything for these peoplse yet

but they have been in my prayers

I don't really know what the best way to help is, and didn't really have money until a copule of days ago

Jon Miller
(was jobless for a bit)

[Ned]

Bosko, thanks for the link. Fascinating that Hobbits lived on Flores at late as 12,000 years ago; and may still live there even today.

As to the thesis that humans were reduced to a handful by Toba, thus explaining our lack of genetic diversity, there is another possibility is there not?

[Bosh]

Originally posted by Ned
Bosko, thanks for the link. Fascinating that Hobbits lived on Flores at late as 12,000 years ago; and may still live there even today.

As to the thesis that humans were reduced to a handful by Toba, thus explaining our lack of genetic diversity, there is another possibility is there not?

There are other explanations, but Toba's the best. It was a really really really big-ass volcano. Also before Toba we find some homo sapiens outside of Africa (mid-east area generally) and then no evidence of homo sapien remains outside of Africa for quite a bit after that (again, according to my old ecology prof).

Also, by looking at mitochondrial DNA we can make a pretty good guess as to when the bottleneck occored and it lines up pretty well to the Toba eruption.

[Ned]

Question: when a new species evolves, its genetic makup has to be somewhat limited, not so? It is not clear to me that our own lack of genetic diversity vis-a-vis the chimps, for example, is not because we are a realtively new species compared to them even though the chart on the link suggests that chimps are a newer species than humans.

Still, it is interesting that the volcanic eruption of Toba brought on a new ice age. If there was a mass extinction of humans at that time, I think it had to occur in the immediate years after the erruption caused by sever cold. The chart indicates that the population collapse occured over thousands of years. I find that to be unlikely.

[Bosh]

Originally posted by Ned
Question: when a new species evolves, its genetic makup has to be somewhat limited, not so? It is not clear to me that our own lack of genetic diversity vis-a-vis the chimps, for example, is not because we are a realtively new species compared to them even though the chart on the link suggests that chimps are a newer species than humans.

Still, it is interesting that the volcanic eruption of Toba brought on a new ice age. If there was a mass extinction of humans at that time, I think it had to occur in the immediate years after the erruption caused by sever cold. The chart indicates that the population collapse occured over thousands of years. I find that to be unlikely.

Again, the paraphrase my old ecology prof, the level of genetic diversity (especially mitochondrial which is only passed on from the mother and mutates at a pretty predictable rate) is low enough to suggest a pretty big bottle-neck at around the time of the Toba eruption. It is not at all consistent with the existance of a relatively large human population all the way back to the older homo sapien remains that we have.

Also the chart you're looking at is just a schematic, we obviously don't when and how fast the human population dropped to cause the bottleneck. Again, all we basically know is:

A. Before the toba eruption there were human populations in the mid-east area and after the toba eruption is seems that humans were knocked back to Africa.

B. Due to the diversity of human mitochondrial DNA it was probable that the human population bottlenecked hard at around the time of the toba eruption. Other scenarios are possible, such as a longer and more gentle bottleneck, but having the toba eruption and the subsequent ice age resulting in a bottle neck in the human population seems the most probable.

C. The toba eruption was very very very big.

[Ned]

What I find shocking, as well, is that Toba is so very, very close to the recent 9.0 earthquake that caused the massive tidal wave. Gives one pause. Could this earthquake portend another massive volcanic event in that area?

Back to DNA. Is there a way to calculate the timing of the so-called bottleneck by some other form of analysis that looks only to the human genome? For example, if we know humans arrived in Australia 50,000 years ago, we can measure the genetic diversity of Australian natives and determine, roughly, the rate of diversification of a population. We can then take the African population and calculate the date of the origin of our species using the Australian metric.