Severn Tsunami 400 years ago

Today 400 years ago a tsunami - some 8 metres high and travelling at nearly 40 mph came up the Severn and hit most of the lowlands - some 2,000 people died. More info here. This was possibly England's worst 'natural disaster' - but nothing compared to the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2 years ago.

Photo: Severn from second crossing bridge

That tsunami that led to over 250,000 deaths and 1.8 million people being homeless was caused by a massive earthquake off the Indonesian coast that had a terrifying ripple effect across thousands of miles of the ocean. Earthquakes, asteroids or even volcanic eruptions might produce such tsunamis with devastating consequences for coastal regions in their path - but there is also growing evidence that climate change could lead to more tsunamis - see article in The Independent. It is certainly true that many things we are doing made matters much worse in SE Asia.

One example is the loss of the mangroves - this was one of the reasons for the tsunami having had such a devastating effect; the lack of these protective coastal ecosystems meant the tsunami hit the coast much harder and left very much greater devastation in it's wake. It is our appetite for shrimps that is partly responsible for the loss of over 35% of the world's mangroves in the last 20 years. One study found shrimp farming accounted for over a third of the mangrove destruction and there are other well documented serious ecological problems associated with shrimp farming - a year ago on the anniversary of that tsunami I wrote to supermarkets about the sourcing of their prawns and shrimps - sadly where they bothered to reply their responses were not great.

It seems we come in this blog entry to where we were in the last entry - we urgently need reform of our trade system.