How nature changes history

What follows in the wake of a tsunami? The death of a nation? Secessionist warfare or, conversely, the unexpected drift of warring parties t...

What follows in the wake of a tsunami? The death of a nation? Secessionist warfare or, conversely, the unexpected drift of warring parties towards a peace table?

If the past is any guide, the response to the shock of December 26 will loom larger in history than the wave itself. Disasters rip away social moorings as harshly as they tear children from their mothers8217; hands, and while faceless nature may be to blame for the first blow, governments may reap the political whirlwind that follows it.

Disasters have often deflected the course of history. The least-studied of these cataclysms took place in 5500 BC, when the Mediterranean, rising as the last Ice Age melted, burst through the hills surrounding a brackish lake to the northeast, and created the Black Sea. Sea water probably poured for weeks through what is now the Bosporus, covering human settlements ringing the lake.

In about 1600 BC, roughly three centuries before the Trojan War, the Santorini volcano sent waves hundreds of feet high across the Mediterranean, devastating Crete, capital of the Minoan empire, its fleet and its coastal cities. The empire was later conquered by the Mycenaeans of the Greek mainland.

And in the Sixth Century AD, the Moche civilisation, based in desert valleys in coastal Peru, may have been fatally weakened by earthquakes and El Nino storms.

But winds and waves, even from average storms, can topple empires if timed perfectly. As Bryn Barnard, the author of Dangerous Planet: Natural Disasters That Changed History, noted, typhoons in 1274 and 1281 later dubbed the 8216;kamikaze8217; or divine wind saved Japan by sinking Mongol amphibious assault fleets. In 1360, an English army was marching on Reims to crown Edward III the king of France when hail the size of pigeons8217; eggs stormed down, killing men and horses and taking the fight out of the superstitious Edward. Invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Hitler bogged down in harsh winters.

The December 26 tsunami will probably not end a civilisation. But it did worsen the prospects for a nation8217;s existence. The Maldives, dependent on tourism, lost islands and a quarter of its 95 resorts, and suffered damage equal to double its gross domestic product. The government8217;s spokesman admitted that its future was in peril. In 2001, Tuvalu, a nation of nine coral atolls, agreed with New Zealand that all 11,000 Tuvalans would resettle there.

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Several areas hit by the tsunami, particularly Aceh, contain some 8216;8216;very dangerous and unpredictable social cocktails8217;8217;, said Paul Saffo, Director of the Institute for the Future, a San Francisco-area research group. The American war on terror, Saffo argued, might fare better by outspending Islamic charities in Indonesia than by 8216;8216;pouring money into the sand8217;8217; in Iraq.

Dr Diane E Davis, a professor of political sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also foresaw change in Aceh. The 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which she studied, hastened the end of 71 years of autocratic rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. In relief efforts run by the Mexican military and police, aid packages were brazenly stolen, and police officers were assigned to rescue sewing machines from a collapsed garment factory while bodies lay in its rubble.

The Indonesian soldiers now running relief in Aceh 8216;8216;could be the same ones that had just been murdering people8217;8217;, she said.

With the right amount of goodwill, though, disasters can be a unifying force, said Dr Michael H Glantz of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

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Perhaps the greatest success for a disaster, he pointed out, was spawned by two earthquakes that took place just three weeks apart in 1999. When one in Turkey killed 17,000 people, the first country to send aid teams was Turkey8217;s ancient enemy, Greece. When Greece in turn had a quake, Turkey reciprocated. The warmer relations eventually led to talks over Cyprus and an end to Greek opposition to Turkey joining the European Union.

8216;8216;Maybe there8217;s a way to get the rebels and government in Sri Lanka to say 8216;We8217;re in this together8217;,8217;8217; said Glantz. Then he hesitated. 8216;8216;But it doesn8217;t really work like that.8217;8217;

The New York Times