This is horrible! My deepest sympathies to the people involved.

Already on here, and other parts of the Internet, there seem to be a variety of responses. The most worrying and contemptible are people making racist comments against the Japanese (not on Mudcat, I hasten to add!). Then there are those who are looking for someone to blame - God, drilling for oil etc., etc. Then there are the religious nutters - the less said about them, the better.

I think that the only things that we can blame are the size of our populations and the complexity of our infrastructures. The Earth has always been restless and dangerous - just to pick one example, 74,000 years ago the Sumatran super-volcano, Toba, erupted and covered most of the Indian sub-continent with up to 10 ft of ash; this apparently had a profound effect on the future of humanity. But populations were tiny then, and a comparative 'handful' of people died.

Now there are vast populations, plus their buildings, vehicles, power plants etc. in the way of each shrug and mutter of the planet. We have succeeded in replacing a neat little bullseye with several huge barn doors. Sadly, we have no one to blame but ourselves.