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Introduction
The year of 2004 has been very unusual in terms of natural disasters that happened almost all at once. First, I learned about Florida’s major hurricane season, during which three big land-falling hurricanes, namely Charley, Frances and Jeanne, caused huge destruction. Two other hurricanes, Ivan and Alex, brushed through other US states nearly at the same time. Yet, the US is not the only country affected by abnormal weather in 2004. In Saskatchewan, for example, the snow level that is usually low, in 2004-2005 was extremely heavy. In Ontario, the snowfalls were also unusually heavy this winter.
The tsunami which originated in the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004, caused widespread destruction in several countries. Numerous TV broadcasts of this disaster showed the damage and questioned the possible patterns in such deadly disasters (including the tsunami off the coast of Vancouver Island that occurred a few hundred years ago and was said to be even stronger than this one). Nearly 280,000 deaths were caused by the Indian Ocean earthquake, and the year of 2004 has been named “the deadliest earthquake year in five centuries”.
With all these events in 2004 being in bright contrast with the previous few years one can only wonder whether there is any kind of pattern, some correlation, between various disasters that sometimes just strike all at once, and if there is – can we estimate the time of the