Sigurður Árni Svanbergsson

The decade has been dominated by several wide-ranging topics, including natural disasters like the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, Hurricane Katrina that slammed the United States’s Gulf Coast in 2005 as well as other devastating tropical storms and earthquakes, international trade and a growing concern over energy supplies, the explosion in telecommunications and data communications, the ecological crisis, a widespread economic failure in the last quarter of the decade, further integration and dependence on technology, concerns with international terrorism and war, which culminated in an attack on the United States on September 11, 2001 and an escalation of the social issues of the 1990s.