Indonesia - land of tsunamis and volcanoes

Indonesia has been living up to its reputation as the most seismically active country on earth. At least 300 people have been killed on the Mentawai Islands off Sumatra by a tsunami, which has washed away at least 13 villages.

After the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, that killed 94,000 people on Sumatra, a new early warning system was installed, but Indonesian officials say two buoys off the Mentawai Islands that formed part of it had been vandalised and were out of service. Even if the system had been functioning properly, though, warnings may still have reached local people too late.

Meanwhile, in central Java, 32 people have been killed by the eruption of the volcano, Mount Merapi. It is regarded as Indonesia’s most active, but the area around is heavily populated, and tens of thousands of people are now in temporary shelters.

Indonesia has seen many major eruptions – the most famous being Krakatoa in 1883, which killed around 36,000 people, though much more powerful was Tambora in 1815, which was responsible for perhaps 80,000 deaths in Indonesia, and thousands more around the world because of the volcanic winter the eruption caused. For more, see A Disastrous History of the World.

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Samoan tsunami

At least 90 people have been killed by a tsunami in Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga. Thousands have been made homeless.

Large parts of the islands are only just above sea level, and a senior official in American Samoa reported that the waves had devastated all the low-lying areas. Samoa's Deputy Prime Minister said the trademark of a tsunami – the sudden rushing out of the ocean – had come just five minutes after houses were shaken by the underwater earthquake.

Young men had tried to raise the alarm by banging gas canisters, but many of those killed were people who had gone to pick up fish stranded by the antics of the sea.

About four in five of the world’s tsunamis happen in the Pacific, and this is the worst since the one in July 2006 that killed up to 800 people on Java.