Black Swan, Pitt Town Lagoon, New South Wales, Australia. No matter how many white swans you might see, you cannot disprove the existence of a black swan. Similarly, just because a plausible, seemingly far-fetched disaster has no precedent in history doesn’t negate the possibility that it might occur. Photo credit: JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/)

Black Swan, Pitt Town Lagoon, New South Wales, Australia. No matter how many white swans you might see, you cannot disprove the existence of a black swan. Similarly, just because a plausible, seemingly far-fetched disaster has no precedent in history doesn’t negate the possibility that it might occur. Photo credit: JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/)

To find a Black Swan event, think about the unthinkable


By Alka Tripathy-Lang

November 25, 2020

On December 26, 2004, more than 750 miles (1200 kilometers) of the Sunda Trench ruptured off the western coast of northern Sumatra, causing the third largest earthquake in recent memory. This quake, and the catastrophic tsunamis it produced, killed more than 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean’s rim, with Indonesia recording the most deaths, followed by Sri Lanka and India.

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