Реферат: A Guide To The End Of The

initiating a cosmic winter, due to dust lifted into the stratosphere blocking out solar radiation, for wiping out a quarter

or so of the human population, and for causing general

mayhem worldwide. The revival of interest in the impact

threat has arisen as a result of two important scientific events

during the last decade: first, the identification of a large

impact crater at Chicxulub, off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula,

which has now been established as the ’smoking gun’

responsible, ultimately, for global genocide at the end of

the Cretaceous period: second, the eye-opening collisions

in 1994 of the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy with

Jupiter. Images flashed around the world of resulting impact

scars larger than our own planet were disconcerting to say

the least and begged the question in many quarters – what if

that were the Earth? Natural hazards and usIf you were not already aware of the scale of the everyday

threat from nature then I hope, by now, to have

engendered a healthy respect for the destructive potential

of the hazards that many of our fellow inhabitants of planet

Earth have to face almost on a daily basis. The reinsurance

company Munich Re., who, for obvious reasons, have a considerable interest in this sort of thing, estimate that up to 15

million people were killed by natural hazards in the last

millennium, and over 3.5 million in the last century alone.

At the end of the second millennium AD, the cost to the

global economy reached unprecedented levels, and in 1999

storms and floods in Europe, India, and South East Asia,

together with severe earthquakes in Turkey and Taiwan and

devastating landslides in Venezuela, contributed to a death

toll of 75,000 and economic losses totalling 100 billion

US$. The last three decades of the twentieth century each saw a

billion or so people suffer due to natural disasters. Unhappily, there is little sign that hazard impacts on society have