Time  magazine this morning had this article:   What are the Five Strongest Earthquakes Ever Recorded? #6 was, of course, that massive Russian Kamchatka earthquake of 8.8 magnitude just experienced at 8:25AM local time on July 30.  Amazingly enough, there was only one death, but this was a woman in Japan while evacuating.  So there was none caused by the earthquake itself.   There was another 8.8 earthquake,  Chile in 2010 , which killed around 600, including 25 still missing.  So there is a tie for #6.  I happened to be in Amsterdam, Netherlands that day, but still wrote an article for the Huffington Post entitled  Hawaii Tsunami?   You can click on that link to read the whole article, but I will provide a beginning here: I'm on an around the world odyssey, which you can follow through my   HuffPost postings . Well, my most exciting day is happening right in front of me watching the 8.8 Chile earthquake cataclysm on ...

  First, Happy Mother's Day. I recall growing up in Honolulu that there was some rivalry between Hawaii and Alaska to become the 49th state. Alaska was a Russian colony from 1744 until the USA bought it in 1867 for $7.2 million. Hawaii was a kingdom until 1893, became a republic in 1894, and through insider links with Congress, was ceded to the USA in 1898.  Much of what happened has continuously till today been contested by the local Hawaiian community for the illegality of it all. In 1893, Queen Lili'uokalani was deposed by a group of American sugar growers and missionaries through a coup d'etat, with the support of the U.S. Marines.  She was last in the long line from the Kamehameha dynasty founded in 1795 by King Kamehameha I. The sugar industry began to form after the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1778.   The first permanent plantation was on Kauai in 1835, in time called Koloa Plantation, where my father grew up. Over the next 30 years, the four major i...