ninme

View map from The Times.

And Drudge is reporting that the entire island of Sumatra moved 100 feet to the southwest. The San Jose Mercury News says for decades tiny islands off Sumatra were sinking, that people noticed as their docks got lower and lower over time, as the Indo-Australian plate moving beneath theirs got snagged and dragged theirs (Eurasian Plate) down as it tried to slide away.. Now that the plates have been shaken free, the islands have bounced back up.

Update: My sentiments exactly. From The Telegraph:

Again, we are reminded of our smallness before nature - heartless, witless nature. It is a characteristic of modern society that we are determined to control our destinies. We cling to the conviction that we can temper our health through diet and exercise, when the hard truth is that, although these things matter at the margins, our propensity to sickness is largely written in our genetic code. Similarly - and even more presumptuously - we like to imagine that we can ameliorate our planet’s weather patterns by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we pour into the air. Whether or not this would have the effects claimed by ecologists - and the science is inconclusive - any gain would be insignificant next to the changes in temperature caused by forces outside our control. The fact is that we live on a dangerous planet.

Our fathers understood this. All the Western religions conceived of man as a puny thing next to his Creator. But, in the 21st century, we chafe at the idea that bad things may simply happen, that there was no way of stopping them, that no one is to blame and that no one can be sued. A tsunami strikes at our precious modern sense of being masters of our fate. We feel, with Gonzalo at the beginning of The Tempest, that there is something particularly unfair about meeting our end this way: “Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, any thing. The wills above be done! but I would fain die a dry death”. Powerlessness is one of the most wretched of human feelings. But there are days when a readiness to accept the hardness of our condition is the only proper attitude. Yesterday was such a day.