Our predictions in UPI Analysis that the death toll in the two catastrophes would be far in excess of original reports was unfortunately confirmed in both cases. When the missing and feared dead estimates in Myanmar from its May 2-3 cyclone disaster are combined with the confirmed death toll, the entire number of those lost could be in excess of 130,000.

More than 40,000 people are now believed lost in the earthquake that devastated China's booming and densely populated Sichuan province. On Monday Chinese authorities said 34,073 people had been killed, with estimates of the final death toll looking close to 50,000. Another 220,000 people were injured.

One of the most chilling aspects of both disasters, however, is that neither was unprecedented. The cyclone toll in Myanmar probably will turn out in all to be around half the number of people who were killed by the tidal waves that swept the shores of the Indian Ocean and related areas in December 2004 -- a catastrophe that killed almost 230,000 people. That disaster resonated particularly heavily in Europe, because so many European holidaymakers at beach resorts in Thailand were among those killed.

Even as terrible cyclones go, the death toll in Myanmar last week was clearly much less than the tidal waves caused by cyclones that ravaged East Pakistan -- today the nation of Bangladesh -- in 1970, killing at least 300,000 people -- with some estimates going as high as a million fatalities.

A seldom remarked aspect of such tragedies in modern times is that they tend to have much higher death tolls than would have been the case 200 or 300 years ago because the world population is so much greater today. The world population is believed to have passed the 1 billion mark for the first time in 1830. Today, there are well over 6 billion people in the world, and the number is growing all the time.

Some of the most violent earthquakes in recorded history have had surprisingly low human death tolls because their epicenters were in extremely remote regions, or because they happened in areas where population density was low at the time, but has since greatly increased.

The most physically powerful earthquakes over the past century in terms of the energy expended and shock waves produced registered 8.6 on the Richter scale and occurred in Kashmir in India in 1905, killing 19,000 people, and Valparaiso, Chile, in 1906, killing 1,500 people. The contrast in casualties reflected the sparse population in the Chilean quake zone at the time.

However, the most physically powerful earthquake ever believed to have occurred in documented history occurred in the continental United States. It was the 1811 New Madrid quake. It was so powerful that it radically changed the course of the Mississippi River.

In those days, the region was lightly populated wilderness, and Indian tribes there lived a nomadic existence and therefore were not exposed to being killed in collapsing buildings. But if a quake of that magnitude occurred in that region today, near the modern city of St. Louis, for example, hundreds of thousands would die.

In 1883 the Indonesian volcano on the island of Krakatoa exploded, killing around 36,000 people and setting off powerful tidal waves. So much dust and ash were thrown into the atmosphere that the entire world experienced breathtaking sunsets for three years afterward.

Three months after the eruption, the debris thrown into the atmosphere had spread to higher latitudes. It caused such vivid red sunset afterglows that fire engines were called out in New York, Poughkeepsie, and New Haven in the northeastern United States because so many people believed the sunsets were destructive fires.

Had the Krakatoa quake occurred today, its death toll probably would have been at least 10 times as high.

It should be added that all these natural disasters combined did not come within causing 10 percent of the death toll that human beings inflicted on each other in World War I, or 2 percent of the total death toll of World War II. When human beings go berserk, they easily outmatch Nature in the body count.

But the Myanmar and China tragedies nevertheless confirm the old lesson that the great French philosopher Voltaire drew from the 1755 earthquake that devastated the Portuguese city of Lisbon: Nature in her nature is far from benign, and periodically erupts with terrifying, random fury -- scattering human beings and all their works like ants.