Mother Nature's Fury: The Disasters of 2010

Dec. 21, 2010 — -- No year passes without these sorts of stories: earthquakes and tornadoes, floods and blizzards, the trauma Mother Nature unleashes, often without warning, in virtually every corner of the planet. Few of us will get through a career in journalism without covering one of these calamities up close.

It's also true that no year passes without the obligatory retrospectives, the looks back at the calendar to catalogue the most compelling stories of the year.

Well, looking back over 2010, at the news that was, those calamities keep piling up.

Call 2010 the year Mother Nature had her way with us. The seminal event, of course, was that awful late-afternoon temblor in Haiti, on January 12. We can remember where we were when the bulletins crossed, and the awful, sinking feelings that came with it: 7.0 earthquake strikes near Port-au-Prince. You knew, instinctively, that this was not a country prepared in any way for this. Haiti's quake alone took some 220,000 lives, and its effects are still felt, as we near the anniversary.

It turned out 2010 was just getting started. February brought us a much stronger quake off the coast of Chile – far and away the year's most powerful, though the human toll was significantly lower. If it seemed the earth was shaking more dramatically than usual, it was: 20 quakes this year have been measured at a magnitude of 7.0 or higher. That's the highest figure in four decades.