The increasing severity of circumpacific natural disasters

The Ring of Fire guards the margins of the continents and island arcs borde ring the Pacific Ocean. Active volcanic belts dominate the terrestrial land scape. and about 100 km off-shore, oceanic trenches parallel the volcanoes. This topographically rugged, geologically unstable transition separating s ubaerial and submerged portions of the solid Earth is a reflection of conve rgent and transform lithospherie plate boundaries. The plates themselves ar e carried along by thermally driven mantle convection. Slow but inexorable differential motions along the plate junctions are responsible for the glob e's most intense seismic activity as well as deadly eruptions. Tsunamis, av alanches, mudflows. and catastrophic land subsidence are common associates in this dynamic geologic realm. Moreover. the world's greatest ocean-a heat -transfer engine driven convectively by incoming solar radiation-spawns the most powerful tropical storms, producing devastating coastal flooding. Now here is the Pacific Rim free of these natural hazards. As the burgeoning po pulations of the Circumpacific nations occupy and more intensively develop and degrade ever-larger tracts along the Rim, the aggregate vulnerability o f society to natural hazards will increase. To the extent that these same C ircumpacific nations increasingly influence global economic systems, the ca scade of suffering produced by episodic natural disasters and the rapid tra nsmission of communicable diseases inevitably will produce more substantial financial as well as human and material losses. We can mitigate but not el iminate the adverse effects of natural hazards through a more complete unde rstanding of their fundamental scientific causes, and by planning according ly. But natural disaster reduction must be coordinated across and transcend political boundaries if we are to be more effective in the future.