Natural disasters

Big earthquake today in Qinghai province, eastern Tibet (could be thousands dead) and huge ash cloud from the unpronounceable Eyjafjallajoekull volcano in Iceland closes airspace across Europe. That's how many mega earthquakes of late? Haiti, Chile, now China - again. And that's not counting one in Turkey last month which happen so regularly they're barely mentioned. But the ash cloud seems to be getting all the attention despite the fact that nobody's been killed, just inconvenienced (albeit a lot). Just goes to show that (a) we rely utterly on plane travel and (b) we don't really know whether it's safe to fly through ash or not.