What if somebody came up to you and said the words, “you can’t do it?” What if somebody came up to you and pushed you down, kicked you, forced you to stop moving forward, and forced you to stop trying? What if this same person knocked you down time and again, reminding you that you are a failure, and that you can never do anything with your life? What if this person told you that you’ll never make it over this next obstacle, or that you can never climb that mountain, or that you can never cross that canyon? Well, look up, because that person is you.

Here you are. The mountain is large, and looms over you with such height and width that you start to second guess yourself. You stand at the base of it and simply stare. The snow hits you in the face, and you can feel the trembling cold that seeps in through your coat and gloves. Maybe you should turn back? Maybe you weren’t ready for this. You look at the top, and realize with a start that you can’t even see it. Clouds surround it so thickly, to the point that you aren’t sure if the top even exists. The doubts start flying in, and you have no choice but to listen to them. And, the more you listen, the more you start to believe them. Giving up, at this moment, seems like the best option in the world. The mountain seems too big anyway. Who even knows whether you’d be able to make it all the way to the top or not?

The problem with facing a disaster is not the obstacle, but our mindset. It’s easy to say, “I’ll cross the valley,” but harder to back up words with actions. It’s easy to say to a mountain, “get up, and move” without having the belief that it will. Soon, as we move through life, we understand that the obstacles and disasters are nothing compared to the problems that you pose to ourselves. It is us; it always was us. We continue to be our biggest obstacle. We are the disaster in our own lives. If we can face ourselves, our doubts and fears, then we can surely face any other thing with ease.

“I can’t get through it.” If you keep telling yourself that, you’ll soon believe it. Our perspective is severely flawed. When we look up and see an obstacle or hardship, that’s all we can see. We are unable, incapable, of looking beyond the negativity. It surrounds us, haunts us, and pushes us down, to the point where we believe we cannot ever stand again. We don’t see the reality of our situation: we are the ones holding ourselves back. What we see before us, that disaster we are so afraid to face, is only a single dot in the ever expanding timeline of our lives. Sure, that disaster may look big now, but soon, we will forget we have ever faced it. The important thing to remember is this; that not everything lasts forever. Our eyes have been deceived; they make the obstacles of our lives look bigger than they really are. So, let’s put the blinders on and go out there, face our fears, face ourselves, face the obstacle, and win.

So okay: you’ve managed to convince yourself to attempt and climb this huge, snowy mountain. You’ve begun to trudge up its side, your feet following the ridges so that your boots have something to grip. It’s harder than you imagined it would be: your fingers are already numb, you can barely see the hand in front of your face, and the cold has managed to find a way underneath all of your protective layers. You’ve already lost one bag of supplies, after an accident when you took to a ridge too steep and put the bag down for a moment to catch your breath. Now, it’s just you, a smaller sack, and your ever-weary determination. You hadn’t thought it’d be this difficult, and you start to make promises to yourself that you aren’t sure you can keep. “Oh, I think I should turn around and try another time,” or “I’ll get more supplies and training and come back in a few years.” You pause your climb and start to wonder if turning back is perhaps that is the best course of action at the moment. Besides, it’s too cold, you’ve already lost one bag, and a huge tiredness is suddenly overcoming you. Maybe next time.

Don’t make excuses. Another problem we face is the fact that we often try and get out of facing a certain obstacle. “It’s too hard,” or “I’ll never win,” or “I’ll face it some other time.” Something we must understand is that, when we procrastinate like this, we have already lost. We have given control over to the disaster and are content to sit there and let it attack us on every side. We’ve given up, became soft and lazy. Since when did we become content with doing nothing? Since when are we comfortable with throwing up our white flag every time we meet something we don’t want to face? Get up! This is not a walk in the park! These are our lives, and this is our time. We’ve been given an opportunity to face a disaster other people have been fighting for years. We need to take it into our own hands and believe in ourselves. Enough with the “do it later”’s and “not for me”’s. It’s time to climb harder than we ever have before. Strive to make it. Believe we can make it. Will ourselves to make it.

Without warning, you’ve run into another problem. You settle down on a flat part of ground to make camp for the night. Then you hear a menacing and intimidating growl from behind you. You quickly turn and come face to face with narrowed feline eyes. A giant snow leopard has followed you and, judging by its demeanor, it doesn’t look friendly. You can feel yourself starting to tremble, and your mind goes blank. You hadn’t expected this kind of threat at all, and with your unpreparedness, you are sure to die if you don’t act quickly. How do you act when faced with such an unexpected disaster as this?

In school, we are taught a number of things. We are taught to work with equations, to memorize dates, to know the steps of a number of different processes. We are expected to test on the curriculum, and to learn, memorize, and be familiar with the assigned material. But, I can promise you this: nothing taught in school can ever prepare you for the obstacles ahead. In math class, we are taught to solve for x, yet never taught how to solve our own problems, just somebody else’s. The truth is that you can never be truly prepared for a disaster. There is no textbook to read, no line to memorize, no equation to plug in. There is no single way to solve the problem. And that scares us. We face our obstacles, trying to solve them in the ways that we have been taught all our lives, but we can’t. We have to learn that sometimes, there is no answer. We can’t always solve the problem. What we can do, however, is to get through it. Face it, and then move on. We won’t ever be prepared for the disasters that are coming our way, but we don’t need to be. Everything we ever needed will not be taught to us in a classroom, or from a book, or even from this essay. Everything we will need is inside us, so use it.

I’ve got good news: You’ve fended off the snow leopard. Out of desperation, you took your last remaining bag, containing the rest of your food supplies, and threw it far away from you. Without hesitation, you ran in the opposite direction, abandoning your temporary campsite and every other thing you brought on this adventure. You are now alone, cold, on a mountain, with no supplies or rations of any kind. While escaping, the snow leopard managed to cut you. The blood has soaked through your bandage, and it drips to the ground below you. It stings like crazy. You finally have processed the predicament that you find yourself in, and conclude that there is no way to turn this into a positive. You tried, you failed, and now you will pay the penalty for it. You can’t help it: you press your cold face into your even colder gloves, and cry. Defeat has overtaken you, and you can think of nothing else except to sit and wait, hoping for a rescue of some kind, or, if not that, some kind of relief. Regardless, you’ve lost. It’s all over now, and the snow has turned red.

 Failure. It is the one thing that every person in the world can say they’ve experienced. But we mislabel what our failure really is. We view our loses as a bad thing. We mess up, we make mistakes, we don’t always make it. Anything that goes awry is a failure. We fear it. We always talk about how much we fail, how we just couldn’t do it. We fail to recognize our true error. Our failure is not messing up. Our failure is giving up. When we fail to try, when we get the notion in our head that we can’t do something, or that we can never get out of the situation we are in, these are the true failures. The belief that something cannot be done is the only mistake we could ever make. The disasters in our lives make it seem as though the impossible cannot be done. But this is not the time to give up. Don’t you dare quit. This is where you are your strongest. It’s not over until you allow it to be over. Stand up. Remember why you set out to conquer this disaster or obstacle in the first place. Find your motivation. You want to get over this mountain? Great, now tell me why. What is your why? Why bother setting out in the first place? You have gotten so far, that the only failure you could possibly have is giving up now. But you are not a failure. You can succeed. The final piece of advice I can give you is this: find your why. Once you can answer this question, you have already faced half the battle. Your motivation is your sword, so use it. Fear isn’t your biggest obstacle; it’s your lack of why, which becomes a lack of motivation. So find it and continue forward.

The snow is white now. The bleeding has stopped, as has your crying. You’ve managed to continue forward. Step after step brings you deeper and deeper into the unknown. You’ve fallen into a rhythm now. Step, step, step, pause. Step, step, step, pause. Step, step … an irregularity. You find you cannot go any further. You quickly lift your head up and your eyes are met with the sight you only believed you could achieve. The most wonderful scene is before you, and as you look around, you realize you know exactly where you are. The clouds have cleared, the snow is white, and you have made it. The top does exist after all. Your faith has become sight. Enjoy the view, for you have earned it. It is yours. You have conquered, you have overcome, you have won.

Tell us how you survive difficult times. Give us your best advice. Share your greatest life lesson. For details, go to our website: www.fountainmagazine.com/essaycontest.

As a highly competitive and commodified industry, sport is not only a weekend, sit-on-the-couch pastime, but is also a political arena where ideologies fight. The recent “take a knee” protest in the US is not a standalone incident. From the ancient Olympic Games to modern-day World Cups, sports have been a means of national pride, and the athletes are considered heroes. Their lifestyles, opinions, and choices are always newsworthy, even if these choices mainly relate to their home countries thousands of miles away.  

One striking recent case is that of Enes Kanter, NBA’s Turkish star, who is at odds with the current Turkish government. Kanter (25) has been an open critic of the government’s corruption. After the July 2016 coup attempt, he started speaking up even more loudly to protest the government’s persecution of tens of thousands of innocent citizens. Justin Pahl talked with Kanter on his life as a devout Muslim in the NBA and on his struggle as an advocate for the oppressed in his home country.

As a follow-up to the story of Abraham (pbuh) in the previous issue, here comes the story of Joseph (pbuh). Two authors, one Muslim and the other Christian, shares their respective scripture’s narratives about the fantastic life of one of the most well-known figures of human history. Joseph (pbuh) is not only a common name in the Abrahamic traditions; his story is filled with many morals to reflect upon, even if they are not Muslim, Christian, or Jewish.

Air, water, bread, and yes, social media – these are some of life’s essentials. No one seems to be unhappy because they are able to tweet or post on Facebook. But, Sage Chen thinks social media is no different than an authoritarian state. With all the data we freely share on social media, we are allowing the platforms we use to have access to an extraordinary amount of our personal information, much of which we would not normally share with others. Chen discusses the many implications of widespread social media use on security, commerce, and privacy.

In his collection of Lem’alar (The Flashes), he dedicates an important section to the story of the prophet Job (Ayyub), who suffered from severe illnesses. Through this story Nursi speaks of the problem of suffering and how it is perceived from a theological perspective. He refers to the Qur’anic verse: “And (remember) Job, when he called upon his Lord saying: ‘affliction has touched me and You are the most Merciful of the merciful’” (21:83). In this story, Job’s illness cleansed his soul while his body suffered. In this way, Job’s suffering served his spiritual healing. Nursi comments on this, saying that an illness is not only physical, but it can also be spiritual. He says, “If our inner being was to be turned outward and our outer being turned inward, we would appear more wounded and diseased than Job.” Nursi continues, “Every sin that we commit, every doubt that comes to our mind, inflicts wounds on our heart and spirit.” Job’s wounds were threatening his worldly life; our spiritual wounds, often, threaten our eternal lives. Because of this we must say a prayer that is one-thousand greater than that of Job. We, like Job, need this prayer, even if we are healthy in body.

Nursi divides disasters into two types. The true disaster, according to Nursi, is the religious disaster. For example, if a Muslim abandons their faithful performance of their religious obligations this would be a religious disaster, and is graver than any physical disaster. Another example that can be given is the harboring doubts; for example, one may doubt God’s existence. This too is a religious disaster if these doubts do not ultimately strengthen one’s faith. In such a case, a person should pray to God for His mercy and ask for guidance and deliverance from this affliction.

The second type of disaster is physical, not religious. This type of disaster often acts as a divine reminder. According to Nursi, this type of disaster does not suggest a wrathful God, but rather a merciful God. He gives an example of a shepherd who is concerned about his sheep: If a shepherd throws a stone at his sheep when they trespass on another’s pasture, they understand that the stone was intended as a warning to save them from a perilous action; full of gratitude, they turn back. Nursi similarly states that there are many apparent disasters that in fact remind us of God and awaken us. Some disasters, likewise, cleanse us of our sins. Some disasters remove carelessness and remind people of their weaknesses and vulnerabilities; it is through these events that we experience a kind of divine presence. Nursi, with regard to illnesses, refers to the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad stating that sins fall away through the trembling caused by a fever, just as a tree drops ripened fruit when shaken.

Nursi says that there are three reasons that humans have no right to complain about di-sasters and illnesses. The first one is that God has made human beings a reflection of his art, clothing them with the cloth of existence. God has made people a model for the reflection of His Names. Therefore, the name of God “The All-Healing” is made known through human illness, while the name “The All-Provider” is made known through human hunger. Existence itself is a great bounty from God; that is, it is a great bounty in comparison to non-existence. According to Nursi, through calamity and illness people are purified from their sin and they attain a higher spiritual rank while they leave this world which is in fact a testing ground for human beings. A monotonous and indolent life is closer to non-existence, which is the absolute evil; existence is the absolute good. Life led monotonously on the couch of ease and comfort resembles not so much the pure good that is being, as the pure evil that is non-being; it tends in fact in that direction.

Nursi goes on to elaborate on the fact “worldly life is a place of testing and an abode of service. It is not a place of wages or rewards. Illnesses and disasters, as long as they do not affect belief and are patiently endured, are beneficial and relevant to worship, strengthening and making every hour of life the equivalent of one day of worship. Instead of complaining, one must be thankful.” In Nursi’s understanding, worship is divided into two types: positive worship (the common form of worship with which we are familiar) and negative worship (e.g. being patient in unpleasant conditions). He includes disasters and illnesses in the category of negative worship; it is through these that humans can understand their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. They pray to their Merciful Lord to help them in these matters, thinking of Him and sincerely appealing to Him. Nursi suggests that if a person is aware of these things, and if they think of the reward that God has prepared and remains thankful then their limited life will bear the fruit of an unlimited life. If these are done while suffering, then one minute of this worldly life becomes like one day spent at worship.

In another section, Nursi speaks of the creation of evil, especially the creation of Satan, and how this can be compatible with the wisdom of God, Who is the Owner of infinite beauty and mercy. How could such a One have created Satan, who is evil and ugly? Nursi tells us, “In the creation of Satan, there are minor evils set beside major good goals and human progress toward perfection. Yes, in the capacity of human progress, which is found in the essence of humanity, there are more stages than even those found in the growth of a seed into a tree. One can even say that these stages are as great as the difference between the size of an atom and the Sun. The development of such human capacities requires movement and action. The mechanism for such an action of development is struggle. Such a struggle requires the existence of Satan, demons, and evil things, against which humans must struggle. Otherwise, the stages of humanity would be static, like those of the angels.” Thus, Nursi says, abandoning thousands of good things in order to prevent the occurrence of one evil is not an action of wisdom or justice. Responding to the statement of “the creation of evil is evil, and the creation of ugliness is ugly,” Nursi says “the creation of evil is not evil, but committing evil is evil. This is because creation-either by creating something out of nothing, or through transformation-is to be evaluated in terms of its results. For example, rain has a thousand results, all of which are beautiful. Some people may suffer because of rain as a result of their neglect to take precautions. Yet, despite the fact that some people have suffered, no one can say that rain is not a mercy, that rain is not good. No one can say that the creation of rain is evil. On the contrary, those who suffer have made rain evil for them through their own neglect.” Nursi continues in this vein, using the example of fire. He argues that in the creation of fire there are many benefits. All of them are good. Some people, however, may make fire harmful for themselves and may suffer as a result. Such people cannot say the creation of fire is bad, but rather the way that they employed fire was bad. Fire was not created to harm people, but people often use fire to harm others and themselves. A simple example of this is the person who does not use fire to cook their dinner, but rather puts their hand in the fire, making it harmful. At this point we need to mention that in some acts of God, like the recent tsunami in the Asia, there are many more dimensions involved than just human neglect and any human precaution simply cannot resist Divine Decree.

Nursi elaborates on this subject by raising the problem that there are many people, who under the temptation of evil go astray. Is such a result still good? With regard to this, Nursi draws our attention to the importance of quality and not quantity. He gives an example of planting one thousand and ten seeds, saying that if a thousand of these seeds whither away and only ten survive to grow into trees one cannot say that planting these seeds was bad, even though a thousand seeds were lost. The ten seeds that became trees will result in thousands more seeds. In humanity, many people go astray because of the creation of Satan, but many others, with great qualities, have benefited humanity in extraordinary ways.

According to Nursi, everything that is created in this world is beautiful because it is a reflection of God’s name, “the All-Beautiful.” To support this, he refers to Al-Ghazzali’s famous statement: “In the world of possibility, there is no better one than the current one.” Nursi refers to opposites: There are some evils, yet these are relatively beautiful because they bring to the fore the character of their opposites. “Ugliness that brings out many beauties is relatively beautiful: Ugliness becomes beautiful. If ugliness, through its disappearance, causes the disappearance of many beautiful things, it becomes even uglier. Humans can understand the existence of warmth because there is cold and the existence of light because there is darkness.” Therefore, according to Nursi “through minor evil, harm, misfortune, and ugliness, some important good acts, encompassing benefits, great bounties, and important beauties appear.”

What we deduce from Nursi’s explanations is that Divine Wisdom may allow seemingly evil things, such as catastrophes, to happen. Disasters happen through His knowledge and His natural laws. Even within the greatest di-saster, God is there with His mercy and beauty. He bestows His private bounties upon those who suffer through such catastrophes. The believers who die in these catastrophes are considered to be martyrs, and their lost property is considered as having been (donated to) charity. 

References

• Nursi, S., The Flashes, tr. Sukran Vahide, Sozler Publication, Istanbul: 1995, pp. 21-28.
• Nursi, S., Risale-i Nur Kulliyati, Nesil, Istanbul: 1996, Vol. I, p.582-83
• Ibid., p. 618. 

As to the former, the main causes of such disasters, where people are capable of significantly of influencing events are carelessness, inaptitude and inertia. We are often able to cope with and even learn from them. Learning lessons from these bitter experiences leads to improvements in safety conditions. Public places are built to be safer and redesigned to minimize the element of human error and to reduce the risk of accident. However, there is little man can do to arrest or mitigate the great eruptions of the earth.

Nowhere to run

The movement of the earth now affects more people than ever before, according to a recent report from the UN (Kerpelman, 1994). The number of people killed, injured or displaced by disasters has increased by 6 percent a year over the 30 years covered by the report. Charles Kerpelman, its author, says floods killed more people than any other type of disaster. In terms of numbers of people killed and injured, Southern Asia and Southern Africa have been the worst. However, ‘there is no area in the world that is really safe from disasters’.

Almost every part of the world is susceptible to at least one kind of disaster that has the potential for causing a large number of deaths and significant damage. In the past 100 years, 1 million people have died in earth-quakes, another million in hurricanes, typhoons and tropical cyclones, and as many as 9 million in floods-these figures do not include the millions of deaths from diseases and famine directly caused by these catastrophes (Robinson, 1993). We can learn from examining the several types of disasters and their effects.

The Atlantic is prone to storms, although the most lethal known storm occurred in the Bay of Bengal in November 1970, when winds of more than 160 kilometres per hour led to the death of an estimated half a million people. Over 45,000 people have been killed by hurricanes and intense tropical storms, in the region this century. The Pacific is not exempt. Hurricane Flora killed 5000 in 1963 on Haiti (Knapp, 1990).

Hurricanes are made of strong winds spiraling around the area of calm which is a few kms across. The largest hurricanes spread over hundreds of kilometres and last for many days. When Hurricane Frederic rushed into the Caribbean Sea in September it reached a speed of 230 kilometres per hour. Within a few hours, $2 billion of damage had been caused, explaining why hurricanes are called the insurer’s nightmare in America. They caused a total loss of $44.2 billion from 1987 to 1993 (Legget, 1993).

Volcanoes occur when the earth’s surface is breached and magma flows forth as lava exploding into the air as tuff. All volcanic eruptions are driven by rapidly expanding gases within the magma. The two factors that determine the violence of an eruption are the amount of dissolved gases and how easily they can escape (Beazley, 1992). In the past few decades we have seen the worst volcanic disasters since the start of the century with 25,000 people killed as a result of just three eruptions, El Chichn in Mexico (1982), Nevada del Ruiz in Columbia (1985) and Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines (1991).

Another class of disaster includes earthquakes. There are 150,000 noticeable earthquakes every year, and over a million can be measured using sensitive apparatus. Nowhere is totally free of earthquakes although the must serious ones are concentrated at the well known ‘faults’. The earth’s crust is not stable, several kinds of cracks and faults lead to earthquakes. In Tokyo 140,000 people-two-thirds of the city- were killed in 1923. More recently, 10,000 people were killed in Mexico City in 1985 and on 30 September 1993, Killari, a village in India, was reduced to rubble within seconds leaving 10,000 people dead. Of course, earthquakes themselves do not usually kill, the deaths are caused by the collapse of buildings, roads and other human artefacts. Considerable destruction is also caused by the aftereffects like fire, flood, landslide and tsunamis-tidal waves. As it is widely known, earthquakes alone are sufficient to destroy the prosperity of any country.

It is obvious that man cannot resist the giant force of the earth’s shock, however, we can hope to reduce the damages by predicting these events and being prepared. Unfortunately, scientists have not reached a reliable way of prediction.

Forecasting or monitoring?

Having suffered many horrifying cataclysms, man has been trying to develop technologies to predict when and where the next disaster emerge. Today, the technical description and analysis of disasters is far more detailed than the past, but we cannot say that man has achieved any reliable forecasting method. Scientists monitor the catastrophes, that is, they record the earth’s activity, they do not predict.

This century has brought scientists a better understanding of some aspects of hurricanes. Many of the major questions remain largely unanswered. We still have relatively little idea, for instance, why some storms turn into hurricanes and others do not; why some hurricanes make landfall and others remain at sea; what causes a hurricane to wobble or even to reverse. Until the arrival of satellites, hurricanes were awkward phenomena to study, impossible to encompass in their entirety. There are still many things to learn, as noted in Science in 1990 that after 30 years of advances in weather satellites, computer forecasting models, and basic research, forecasters have reduced error in predicting the paths of hurricanes by just 14 percent.

Despite the astonishing technology of the late twentieth century, volcanic eruption prediction remains a humbling science, The history of a volcano, both its geology and its eruptions, if known well enough, is often a good guide to its future behaviour, however, monitoring restless magma is one thing, forecasting when it will erupt is another The chairman of the Coordinating Committee for Prediction of Volcanic Eruptions wrote in Nature that ‘the prediction of eruptions is extremely difficult….the prediction of the date and time of initial outburst is still like a kind of betting’ (Robinson, 1993). Recently, radar systems have been used to study erupting volcanoes, however, Rick Hobblit, a volcanologist admits that the single most important piece of information you can have is whether an explosive eruption is in progress’ (Pendick, 1993).

The introduction of a special issue of The Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America stated that ‘earthquakes do not have to occur where and when we want them or forecast them to occur and our understanding of how and why earthquakes occur and recur, even along the best studied active crustal fault in the world, is rudimentary and incomplete’. Brian Brady, a geologist studying quake-like rock bursts in mines, had made a notorious prediction that a giant earthquake would strike Peru in June 1981. The people of Peru, 66,000 of whom had died in an earthquake as recently as 1970, became jittery and restless as June 1981 approached. The result? Nothing happened. Later Brady wrote, defending himself that ‘our expanding knowledge of the earth derived from the extraordinary sophistication of new instrumentation, has ironically served to magnify our lack of understanding’ (Robinson, 1993).

Not only to destroy

So far, we have attempted to show the damage caused by disasters and the level of our understanding of them. Bearing in mind that everything in the universe exists or happens for a reason, we may ask ourselves what is behind these catastrophes which cause such great loss to destruction. As Charles Darwin said reporting the ruin of Concepcion in Chile, by an earthquake, ‘it is a bitter thing to see works, which have cost man so much time and labour, overthrown in one minute’. But unlike Darwin, we believe every event in the universe is planned. Elsewhere, our scholars have explained this more fully. Here it is sufficient to say that like everything in the universe, disastrous activities of the earth, too, have some benefits to earth and its inhabitants.

Storms and hurricanes help disturb the whole depths of the sea so that plankton-tiny creatures on which most fish swimming near the surface feed-get their food as chemicals from the sea bed. They carry heat from the tropics to the poles helping to even out the world temperatures. If this did not happen the tropics would get hotter and hotter. The poles would ice over without the heat from the tropics. Storms and hurricanes simply do the vital job of carrying surplus energy quickly across the earth. Severe storms such as hurricanes help drought-stricken lands recover. When dry air sits over continents like Asia, a great concentration of energy is needed to make big clouds that will bring rain. This is usually provided by hurricanes (Knapp, 1990).

It is widely known that volcanic eruptions have an overall cooling effect on the earth. Volcanoes cool the globe by injecting large quantities of material into the stratosphere, especially droplets of sulphuric acid. Once in the stratosphere, this material absorbs heat from the sun, preventing it from reaching the ground. This influence can last for several years.

Already, the Pinatubo eruption has cooled the earth’s surface by an average of 0.5 °C. One other benefit of volcanic eruptions is their 20,000 atm- pressure from magma to surface which helps the earth harden and provides protection from earthquakes. The idea that the volcanoes diminish the ozone layer is denied by recent research which argues that ‘the chlorine emitted during volcanic eruptions is not responsible for the damage to ozone layer. Two researchers in the University of California have shown that although large amounts of hydrogen chloride are released during some volcanic eruptions, the compound is efficiently washed out in the rain that always accompanies such eruptions’ (Science, vol.260, p.1O82).

Conclusion

We have attempted to show the effect of disasters in terms of loss of life and money and how far we are from understanding the earth and its activities. Even the dazzling technological advances of the twentieth century could not help us overcome the violence of the earth-shaking events, apart from showing us our lack of understanding. Scientists need to carry on experimenting and studying the mysteries of the world so that man can cope with nature. We must always bear in mind that all those horrifying activities of the earth are not purposeless and free from reason but help maintain the earth’s vitality. They perform tasks that cannot be carried out in more gentle conditions.