hazardous living

By Tuesday evening local time, close to 500 people have been confirmed dead and more than 1,300 injured following a major magnitude-7.2 earthquake that struck eastern Turkey on Sunday at 1:41 p.m. local time. Countless people are still trapped under debris after the shallow quake, only 20 kilometers deep, leveled at least 2,260 buildings in Van, Ercis and other cities and villages, according to news reports.

Today, at 4:53 p.m. ET, the space shuttle Discovery launched for the last time. When it returns to Earth in 11 days, the shuttle will be retired.

They’re calling it “California’s Other Big One” — the giant storm that could drop more than two meters of rain on California and cause massive flooding, landslides, levee failures and general catastrophic chaos. It’s probably not that hard to imagine this year for water-weary Californians who have been hit hard by heavy rains and subsequent floods and landslides since early winter.

Heavy rains last week caused the roof of a 2,000-year-old frescoed house at Pompeii to crash in, much to the dismay of the Italian government. The house, thought to have been erected just before Vesuvius buried Pompeii under six meters of ash in A.D. 79, was outside an amphitheatre and had been used by gladiators before going into battle. According to an Associated Press story, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano called the cave-in a "disgrace for Italy," and he demanded an explanation.

This weekend marks the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s strike on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

Last November, a thousand private e-mails between prominent climatologists were hacked, resulting in a brouhaha that threatened to discredit the work presented in the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report.

News out of Italy suggests that seven researchers who did not predict the L’Aquila earthquake in April 2009 are under formal investigation and may be charged with gross negligent manslaughter.

Guatemala's Pacaya volcano and Ecuador’s Tungurahua vociferously erupted on Thursday, wreaking havoc on villages and cities nearby.

Thirty years ago today, sometime not long after 8:30 a.m. Pacific time, Mount St. Helens explosively erupted. The shock wave from the eruption washed over Oregon and Washington, shaking the ground up to 400 kilometers away. Two earthquakes followed, at 8:32 and 8:34 a.m. Shortly thereafter, with a tremendous burst, the upper north flank gave way as gas, steam and ash vented outward and sent out an immense landslide of hot rock, mud, water, ash and debris.

Earthquakes, volcanoes and blizzards, oh my. Is this year anomalous? Has Mother Nature turned on us and decided to shake up the planet? Are we headed toward an apocalypse?

When Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano began erupting March 20, few people expected it to wind up wreaking havoc on the world’s travel. Yet that’s what it has done, as the eruption has ramped up in the last few days and is now spewing steam and ash several kilometers into the air. The winds over the North Atlantic have blown the ash cloud over Northern Europe, grounding tens of thousands of flights for myriad reasons, not the least of which is that ash can clog jet engines, causing them to fail.

As the space shuttle Atlantis prepared for liftoff for the final time this morning, I was humming Europe’s 1986 hit “Final Countdown” in my office. As the countdown proceeded, I got chills. When Atlantis lifted off, I got a little teary-eyed. Watching NASA TV for the next hour, I couldn’t help but wonder what will become of all the people involved in the space shuttle program — mission control, the engineers, the astronauts. It’s hard not to think of this as the end of the U.S. space program. But as we’re assured by NASA, it most certainly is not.