The Indian Ocean has been a focus point for nature's wrath in recent years. In December 2004 a series of giant tidal waves or tsunami triggered by a colossal earthquake 100 miles off the Indonesian island of Sumatra drowned more than 229,000 people, obliterating communities in Thailand, Indonesia and on the eastern coast of India. It was the most powerful earthquake on record in 40 years since the Alaskan quake of 1964. It was also the fifth-strongest earthquake recorded anywhere in the past century.

Earlier, two of the most devastating tidal wave disasters in modern history occurred in the same region.

By far the worst was the enormous surge that killed at least 300,000 people and possibly as many as a million in Bangladesh -- then still East Pakistan -- on Nov. 13, 1970. That tidal wave was triggered by an earlier cyclone in the Bay of Bengal.

In 1883 the Indonesian volcano on the island of Krakatoa exploded killing around 36,000 people and setting off powerful tidal waves. So much dust and ash was thrown into the atmosphere that the entire world experienced breathtaking sunsets for three years afterwards.

The worst natural disaster by far of the past century is almost unknown in the West. It was a devastating flood along the Yangtze River in China in August 1931 that killed 3.7 million from drowning, disease and starvation.

The records of some ancient civilizations hint at even worse disasters in the distant past. The Shu-King, the records of the legendary Chinese Emperor Yao, tell of an immense wave "that reached the sky" before it flooded the entire land of China. The account states, "The water was well up on the high mountains and the foothills could not be seen at all." According to the ancient Chinese records, it took years of massive public works and the labor of millions to drain the land.

The worst earthquake of the 20th century in its human toll was the 1976 quake, in Tangshan, China, which registered 7.8 on the Richter scale. It killed an estimated 240,000 people.

The great French archaeologist Claude Schaeffer, excavator of the Bronze Age City of Ugarit, in present-day Syria, believed that enormous earthquakes had occurred thousands of years ago and repeatedly destroyed settlements throughout the ancient Near East, bringing to an end the Early Bronze Age and disrupting civilizations again and again.

A massive earthquake in Crete -- still a seismically sensitive zone -- is believed by many archaeologists to have destroyed the high civilization of Middle Bronze Age Crete, thought by many to have been the inspiration for the legend of Atlantis. The writer Mary Renault used it as the basis for her classic historical novel "The King Must Die."

One controversial scholar, the late Immanuel Velikovsky, even argued in 1950 in his book "Worlds in Collision" that the 10th Plague of the Exodus in the Bible -- the death of the first born of Egypt -- was in reality a massive earthquake that ended the Middle Kingdom period. Velikovsky also cited the testimony of many ancient peoples from Siberia to Mexico and the American Pacific Northwest claiming that gigantic tidal waves had swept over the land in ancient times.

The most physically powerful earthquake ever believed to have occurred in documented history occurred in the continental United States. It was the 1811 New Madrid quake. It was so powerful it radically changed the course of the Mississippi River.

In those days, the region was lightly populated wilderness, and Indian tribes there lived a nomadic existence and therefore were not exposed to being killed in collapsing buildings. But if a quake of that magnitude occurred in that region today, near the modern city of St. Louis, for example, hundreds of thousands would die.

The Book of Revelation predicts a dramatic earthquake will shake the earth before the Second Coming of Christ. Accordingly, Christian fundamentalist groups have always been prone to see earthquakes as signs of divine judgment or of the imminence of the return of Jesus.

In 1923 Tokyo was destroyed by an earthquake that registered 8.3 on the Richter scale. It is believed to have been the most severe earthquake ever to strike a major city in recorded history. The 1976 Tangshan quake, for all its even vaster death toll, "only" measured 7.8.

Estimates of the Tokyo death toll vary from 99,000 to 150,000. It was as destructive as the U.S. Army Air Force firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. The great movie director Akira Kurosawa later said the vivid tableaux of slaughtered armies in his classic samurai movies was inspired by what he saw in the aftermath of the Tokyo quake.

Some psychologists and anthropologists have even theorized that the immense popularity of Godzilla and other monster movies in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s was in some way a reaction to the 1923 quake and the 1945 firebombing.

Such myths reflect a powerful truth subconsciously felt. The wrath of Nature, as expressed once again in Myanmar's cyclone tragedy, can outstrip the worst monsters of the human imagination.

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