DESPERATE HOURS - EP. 02

Earthquakes have always been with us, but it is really only in the last 50 years or so, that their devastating impact has been captured so vividly - not only in photographs but in moving images, broadcast around the world at first via television, and in the last 20 years or so over the internet. Some of the images that have been captured on film or tape go beyond human capacity to describe. So the earth really moves in this episode, as we take in scenes and stories from some of the most devastating of all natural cataclysms. The earthquake, in all its destructive power! Of all the natural disasters we look at in this episode, none releases more sheer destructive energy than an earthquake. After all, it takes a great deal of the Earth's energy, for two of its magnetic plates to grind against each long enough, that they go snap - and jolt the planet?s outer crust for hundreds of square miles!  Most earthquakes take place within the so-called ?Ring of Fire? around the Pacific Ocean. At least once a year Alaska experiences a 7.0 earthquake. California alone gets about 10,000 quakes a year, but most go unnoticed except by seismographs.