"It's the end of the world as we know it..."

2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and many other movies in the past decade or two have played with the idea that the world is going to be wiped out by a series of natural disasters. I'm definitely not planning on joining a religious-fanatic-suicide cult any time soon, but natural disasters do seem to be getting closer and closer together. The tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004 was followed the next year by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Now, five years after Katrina, we have had four natural disasters in less than two months. Three of those occurred in the last couple of days. January 12th, Haiti was hit by a 7.0 magnitude earth quake. Yesterday, February 27th, Chile was struck by an 8.8 magnitude quake early in the morning and nearby islands ("Robinson Crusoe" islands) were the first to be hit by the resulting tsunami. The tsunami also hit New Zealand and Hawaii (there wasn't as much impact as people expected), and there were higher than normal waves along parts of the coasts of California and Central America. Earlier today, France and other countries of Western Europe had to deal with a cyclone (a hurricane that spins the opposite direction), which caused flooding and even deaths.