“There are some things that you know to be true, and others that you know to be false; yet, despite this extensive knowledge that you have, there remain many things whose truth or falsity is not known to you. We say that you are uncertain about them. You are uncertain, to varying degrees, about everything in the future; much of the past is hidden from you; and there is a lot of the present about which you do not have full information. Uncertainty is everywhere and you cannot escape from it.” Dennis Lindley, Understanding Uncertainty (2006)
Being from Denmark and living in Switzerland, I can, at times, be bemused by the kind of public debate that ensues in this country. Recently, there was a flare up of a recurring public debate about the renewal of what, at their peak in the 80s, were 3,000+ explosive installations in the country. These explosives were mostly installed after WW II, and were wired at tunnels and bridges at strategic points. Logically, you can delay an advancing army in a mountainous geography like Switzerland by destroying bridges and tunnels. The Swiss being thorough, meticulous, and detail oriented, would obviously want to keep their defences intact. However, there is a growing recognition that the nature of the threat to the country has shifted from advancing armies to terrorism and cyber hacking, against which blowing up a bridge is rarely very helpful.
The debate spurred my curiosity as to what is really a threat in this country, and I found an article in the Economist about a tsunami in Lac Leman (Lake Geneva) back in 600 A.D. Intrigued by this tsunami, which was totally unknown to me, I did some further digging:
- In 563, a massive rock fall at the eastern end of Lake Geneva caused part of the Rhone delta to collapse and slide into the lake, triggering a tsunami that caused considerable destruction around the lake.
- In 1584, an earthquake near Aigle, in canton Vaud in the Rhone Valley, damaged villages along the northeastern shore of Lake Geneva, as well as causing a rockslide that killed 320 people and a tsunami that reportedly flooded shorelines in Villeneuve, Lausanne, and Geneva.
- In 1601, a magnitude 6 underwater earthquake in Lake Lucerne triggered huge waves that left the city of Lucerne under water.
- In 1687, a spontaneous collapse of the Muota…
