That has got to be a violent tornado. Get those kids in that basement. Get 'em in that closet. Get away from the windows. Get away from the windows. Get away! Get away! People underneath the girders of this overpass. They're still hanging on. Oh my God, we're having an earthquake. Wait a minute. Hold on. Hold on. Can you feel that? There go the lights. Oh! We have a major fire burning near San Francisco's marina district. We have the band now approaching the coast. So we're just starting the long period of about 12 to 16 hours when we're going to experience the thrust of this hurricane. Can we spend most of our lives learning how to control ourselves and our environment? And suddenly, you wake up with the realization I am not in control. In cities all across the world, we go about our daily routines, secure in our surroundings, confident that our lives are orderly and predictable. But at any moment, that confidence can be shattered, as nature demonstrates that it still has the upper hand.

From deep in the earth come clues to mystery nearly 2,000 years old. They died instantly, victims of a volcano's wrath. But only now are we beginning to piece together the mosaic that tells of their tragic final hours. Pulsing with an electric energy uniquely its own, southern Italy is also the intimate companion of destruction and death. Active for 17,000 years, Mount Vesuvius erupted most recently in 1944, devastating two towns. Only a few miles from Vesuvius another town lives with yet a different threat. Here, the sea appears to be boiling, the earth regularly grumbles and groans and sulfuric gases choke the air. Vesuvius slumbers, one scientist wrote, but his heart is still awake. A microcosm of our eternal battle with forces we cannot tame, this is life in the shadow of Vesuvius Washed by the placid waters of the Bay of Naples, the region of Campania has long attracted poets and travelers, emperors and kings. Two thousand years ago writers described Campania as the most blest land, "the fairest of all regions, not only in Italy but in all the world," "a place where the summers are cool and winters warm and where the sea dies away gently as it kisses the shore." The climate and extraordinarily rich soil enabled farmers then, as now, to grow grapes, olives, and up to four seed crops a year. But 2,000 years ago few understood that the richness of the soil was a gift from the mountain in their midst that the mountain was in fact a volcano. Tags: Animals, Nature, What Is Nature, Natural, Natural Resources, Natural History, Wild, Forest, Rivers, Falls, Jungle, Earth, Plants, Natural Products, Natural Food

The human mind has always had a fascination with worlds beyond our own Following the stars across the seas, early explorers imagined that they might meet weird creatures in undiscovered lands. They never guessed that under their keels, drifting in the same currents that carried their ships, were life forms far stranger than anything they could imagine. It's a world where the forces of pressure and darkness have given rise to creatures as different as on another planet. Their whole existence is shaped by the great ocean currents, which sweep them endlessly around the biggest living space in the solar system. At the edge of this alien world, here in Florida, one ocean drifter comes from the beach itself. It can take these hatchlings three days to claw their way up from nests buried two feet deep. They may look like land animals now, but sea turtles have evolved for 80 million years to be riders of the ocean currents. These loggerhead turtles, no larger than a child's hand, are about to embark on a perilous 10-year journey around the ocean. Tags: Animals, Nature, What Is Nature, Natural, Natural Resources, Natural History, Wild, Forest, Rivers, Falls, Jungle, Earth, Plants, Natural Products, Natural Food