Instant Perspective

Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami - via NYTimes.com

There's a lot of disaster media going around. The coverage of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and now the nuclear crisis has seen cyberspace provided with endless videos, photos, graphs, and articles, some more accurate and others more hysterical. For sheer "see it for yourself" bang for the buck, though, the NYTimes does it best. Understated, scrupulous, devastating. Move the slider across the image to see the before and after of the same shot.

I have never seen this done before, and I think it's worth noting that we have now gotten to the point where media like this can put us almost in the back yard of places thousands of miles away from where we live. Have a look at this. It's an unedited, single-shot video of the tsunami coming ashore in Kesennuma, Miyagi prefecture. In six minutes you watch the wave build from the first rills of murky water shooting up the asphalt, to cars and vans floating away, to whole houses being swept from their foundations and moving through the streets like so many restless elephants.

Even after the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, we did not see media this rich, this immediate, and this deeply upsetting. You can endlessly argue the ethics of technology, but there can be no doubt that it is now enabling us to expand our empathic reaction to cover the entire planet. I'd like to quote Swami Beyondananda on this one: "If it appears that the sky is falling, it is only because we are ascending."