Populations at Risk in Indonesia

This week's combination of earthquake, tsunami, and volcano eruption in Indonesia killed at least 400 people (with another 160 still unaccounted for--including people who were out fishing at the time and had no clue what was happening, or people along the shore who were swept out to sea), and displaced tens of thousands. That is clearly less bad than the hundreds of thousands who were wiped out by the tsunami of 2004, but it is a terrible tragedy nonetheless. 

Much of Indonesia lies in the seismically active Pacific “ring of fire,” a series of fault lines stretching from the Western Hemisphere through Japan and Southeast Asia. Experts said that the earthquake was not big enough to have disturbed the volcano, and that the two events were most likely not related.

Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous nation, so living in an ecologically dangerous zone has not hobbled its population growth; rather, the latter has meant that over time an increasingly large number of people have found themselves somewhat inadvertently placed in harm's way.