Is Mother Nature acting out?

By Robin Lloyd

updated 2:09 p.m. ET May 8, 2008

The Myanmar cyclone. The earthquake off the coast of Japan. The Chilean volcano. Has Earth gone bonkers?

Not at all. This level of natural activity is normal for Earth, scientists say.

"Mother Nature is just reminding us that she is in charge," Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told LiveScience.

That also means the recent Midwestern quake (centered in Illinois) and temblors near Reno, though unnerving and frightening to locals, were just another day for Planet Earth.

Reference point
A look back at events in 2007 serves to remind just how wild this world routinely is. EM-DAT, the OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database, tracks natural disasters in which either 10 or more people were killed, 100 or more people were affected, a state of emergency was declared, or there was a call for international assistance.

In the United States in 2007, EM-DAT tallied four such tornado disasters, five winter storms, seven floods, two wildfires and a drought in various locations. Non-EM-DAT events included six U.S. hurricanes and 2,789 earthquakes of which 80 were 5.0-magnitude or greater, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Tornadoes are an American affliction primarily, it's true, but that is a result of geography, Patzert said. About 80 percent of tornadoes in the world happen in the United States because cool Canadian air mixes with warm moist air coming from the Gulf of Mexico, he said.

The appearance of a cluster
It might look and feel like the recent disasters worldwide are a cluster of events that could be related, but scientists say they aren't.

"It's totally random," said Peter Kelemen, a geologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York.

INTERACTIVE Nine killer earthquakes Thousands rattle the Earth daily — but only a few cause utter devastation.

Kelemen this week told the story of anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who detailed the thinking of Trobriand Islanders in his book, "Magic, Science, and Religion" (1948).

"He said the distinction between magic and science for those Trobriand Islanders was that for magic you only count confirming cases," Keleman said. "And so, say you had this idea that earthquakes occur right before or after volcanic eruptions, so when that happens you notice and you put a notch in your stick or whatever. When there is earthquake that doesn’t occur with a volcanic eruption, you don't notice at all or say there must have been mitigating circumstances in this case."

Scientists can fall into the same trap.

"Scientists do an awful lot of what Malinowski would've called magic all the time," Keleman said. "We filter data and come up with reasons why our [results] in one instance are not correct and that allows us to overlook that instance. Nevertheless, it's a trap."

Keleman suspects people are struck by similar coincidences in nature and "probably don't make a note of it when there is an earthquake and no volcano. It is only when these things are happening clusters that it makes an impression on you."

He pointed out that you can use a computer to generate random numbers and plot them graphically and see patterns and clustering. Clearly though, there is no natural or scientific phenomenon behind those figures.

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