Students may be a little young to remember the tsunami of 2004 (videos here). Anyway, largest earthquake in the world in 40 years, sudden vertical rise of the seabed by several meters, initial wave of about 35 (and tsunami waves do not break offshore), eventually ocean water up to 170 feet deep on land. And 228K people killed. Many vacation spots around the Indian Ocean were hit (the day after Christmas) so it was a global catastrophe.
Passed that this week too. We're up to 256K worldwide now.
We're now ranking this with worst natural disasters in human history. COVID-19 is number 6 right now. We should pass another during the week of the 11th (the 1920 earthquake in China), and another during the week of the 18th (the Haitian earthquake of 2010).
Wouldn't it be a better comparison to measure by % of world population impacted?
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