Environments and People - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 28

Figure 2-2
The Spiti V alley , in the Indian Himalayas, clearly illustrates the
impact of water , wind, and ice in physical landscape formation.
A small community with its barley fields clings to the base of
the alluvial fan. The Spiti River is a tributary of the Indus River
system. Photograph courtesy of B. A. Weightman.

Figure 2-3
Many Tibetans live in the Himalayas of India' s HimachalPradesh.
This gompa (monastery), at almost 13,000 feet (3,890 m), was
built in the sixteenth century . Photograph courtesy of B. A. Weightman.

Did you know that Asia is the world' is most
disaster-prone region?

toll was estimated at 92,000. China' s Tangshan
earthquakein 1976 killed more than 240,000 people,
and a 1993 quake in western India' s Maharashtra
state took 12,000 lives. The Philippines' Mount
Pinatubo eruption in 1991 and Japan' s Kobe quake
in 1995 registered relatively low death tolls but
caused considerable damage. In 2001, a 6.9 quake in
Gujarat, India, killed more than 20,000 people. At
least 87,476 people died in 2008 in a 7.9 earthquake
in China' s Sichuan Province. And even more recently ,
on September 30, 2009 a 7.6 quake with its epicenter
in the sea west of Padang in Indonesia' s West Sumatra
Province resulted in the deaths of some 1,115 people
and caused immeasurable property damage.

The P acific Ring of Fire

Half of all major natural disasters are in the Asia-
Pacific region. Because of the abundance and inten-
sity of seismic activity , the region is often referred
to as the Pacific Ring of Fire (Figure 2-4).
V olcanic eruptions and earthquakes have
wreaked havoc on humanity for millennia. The most
powerful eruption in recorded history occurred on
the Indonesian island of Sumbawa in 1815 when
Mount Tambora (9,348 ft, 2,850 m) blew up 100
billion tons of volcanic rock and debris. The death