WASHINGTON – Man can dam rivers, build skyscrapers, even go to the moon, but sometimes nature needs only a split second to remind us who’s really boss.

Last Sunday’s tsunami offers yet another humbling lesson that the power of nature far exceeds the reach – indeed, even the imagination – of man.

The earthquake and subsequent tsunami released as much energy as 1 million atomic bombs. It changed – slightly but perceptibly to modern science – the wobble and rotation of the Earth. It also redistributed Earth’s mass, moving the North Pole 1 inch and causing the length of a day to shrink permanently by 3 millionths of a second, according to geophysicist Richard Gross of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It also prompted prominent scientists to ponder the relationship between mankind, nature and God.

Yet this monstrous event – whose reported death toll hit 123,000 Saturday and could rise to 150,000 – wasn’t even the worst natural disaster of the past 30 years. The 1976 Tangshan earthquake in China killed at least 255,000 people, and maybe more than half a million.

And when measured by geologic time, last Sunday’s upheaval of earth and sea was but a mere pygmy.

Consider, for example, that about 65 million years ago, a 6-mile-wide asteroid smashed into the Earth and triggered a tsunami 300 feet high. It threw debris into the air that blotted out the sun and caused a global winter, and it killed about three-quarters of the Earth’s species, probably including dinosaurs.

That was the fifth mass extinction in Earth’s history.

“Mother Nature will win when she wants to,” said Kathryn Sullivan, the first U.S. woman to walk in space and a former chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

During three space-shuttle flights, Sullivan said, she would gaze through her “office window” down at Earth. She saw storms and hurricanes that revealed “the scale, the magnitude, the sheer power of Earth’s natural structure.” She also noticed wisps rising from the storms – “these most elegant, gorgeous, almost filigree structures.”

When the forces of man and nature clash, she said, “you get reminded that the power of this planet is really there. We are, in our forces, implicitly nothing.”

Nature’s unleashed forces are still building this world.

Last Sunday’s tsunami “is something that in an instant demonstrates to us the dynamic processes that shape our planet; it’s why we have mountains,” said Paul Richards, a professor of natural sciences at Columbia University. “It’s what it means to be a member of planet Earth. … Does that inspire awe? Obviously, it does.”

Scientists say the more they study Earth and the universe, the more they’re struck by the imbalance of power between humanity and creation.

“Nature is much more powerful, and we have precious little ability to influence what happens at that scale,” said Rice University professor Neal Lane, former chief science adviser to President Clinton. “It’s a deeply humbling experience. We are able to control an infinitesimal amount of energy compared to the natural-energy events going on in the universe.”

Mankind has much to be humble about.

“The forces of man are pretty puny,” said biology professor Ursula Goodenough at Washington University in St. Louis. Tsunamis remind scientists to think about great forces and “what we give assent to for having the gift of the lives we have.”

Humans continue to struggle against larger powers, often trying to control or at least harness nature, and sometimes succeeding – until dramatic events such as this mock human presumption.

This bothers some scientists, including Kathleen Tierney, a University of Colorado sociologist and the director of the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center.

By damming natural rivers and building large cities in hurricane-prone areas such as Florida, “we are continuing to act as if nature doesn’t even exist, and that we can do anything we want on this planet and we’re not going to suffer the consequences from it,” Tierney said.

Dams, for example, prevent small-scale flooding. However, a massive flood not only can overwhelm the human-built system, but dams also can make the disaster worse, because homes were built where they wouldn’t have been if not for the protection presumed from such structures.

“Do we respect nature and do we live with nature? No, we want nature to do our bidding,” Tierney said. “We live in a society that believes that technology can solve all of our problems, that we can overcome our own human limitations through technology.”

When a tsunami comes, she said, it shows that Earth “doesn’t care. It’s nature.”

Disasters do, however, reveal another human power, one that can’t be measured in energy released, physical destruction or computer calculations of the Earth’s spin.

“What I see in disaster,” Tierney said, “is the tremendous resilience of people.”

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