Mother Nature's Fury

It was sad to hear the news about the earthquake in Indonesia yesterday. My deepest condolences to the people who were directly or indirectly affected by the catastrophe. 3000+ lives lost in an instant. The news made me both sad and angry. Sad at all the suffering and angry at the helplessness of man at the feet of nature. I don't think any of those people deserved the kind of fate that occurred to them, moroever, caused by mother nature. Sometimes it really scares the daylights out of me to know that we can't do anything about it except stand there and watch the destruction. Absolutely stripped of any kind of defense against such incidents, earthquakes have the tendency of leaving a permanent scar in the area that they attack. It's pretty puzzling to know that we have the technology to forecast the weather above the ground for the next 10 days, but don't have any such system for forecasting what happens below.

I was thinking about a system to reduce if not eliminate such earthquakes and decrease the damage caused due to them. An earthquake occurs when the pressure caused due to the collision of plates beneath the surface of the earth is suddenly released. We already have a map of the various faults beneath the earth and also the places where the different plates collide or overlap. If we know that there is intense pressure activity at some point along a fault line, we could try to release that pressure by evacuating the area near the fault and using explosives (probably nuclear) to cause a disturbance and thereby triggering a premature release of the built-up pressure. The task of deciding the best location to place the explosives and the area of evacuation would just be a matter of using geology, mathematics, physics and engineering. I'm no geo-science student, so my idea could be totally stupid. I was just thinking from an engineering point of view. I got the inspiration for this idea when frying pooris. Most of the times I noticed that the steam that builds up inside the poori suddenly erupts from a crack on the skin which occurs at some random point. However, I noticed that if I made a small incision at a specified point, the steam would escape from there and nowhere else. If you imagine the poori as the earth and the steam as the pressure, then I'm sure you would realize what I'm talking about.

We may try as much as we can, however, I guess certain things in life are just not within our control and we need to accept this fact. However, it is highly unacceptable to realize that we are still living at the mercy of nature. I would like to see a denial of that statement in the near future.