Washington ? Man can dam rivers, build skyscrapers, even go to the moon, but sometimes nature needs only a split second to remind us who’s really boss.

Last Sunday’s tsunami offers yet another humbling lesson that the power of nature far exceeds the reach — indeed, even the imagination — of man.

The earthquake and subsequent tsunami released as much energy as 1 million atomic bombs. It changed — slightly but perceptibly to modern science — the wobble and rotation of the Earth. It also redistributed Earth’s mass, moving the North Pole 1 inch and causing the length of a day to shrink permanently by 3 millionths of a second, according to geophysicist Richard Gross of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It also prompted prominent scientists to ponder the relationship between mankind, nature and God.

Yet this monstrous event — whose reported death toll hit 123,000 Saturday and could rise to 150,000 — wasn’t even the worst natural disaster of the past 30 years. The 1976 Tangshan earthquake in China killed at least 255,000 people, and maybe more than half a million.

And when measured by geologic time, last Sunday’s upheaval of earth and sea was but a mere pygmy.

Consider, for example, that about 65 million years ago, a 6-mile-wide asteroid smashed into the Earth and triggered a tsunami 300 feet high. It threw debris into the air that blotted out the sun and caused a global winter, and it killed about three-quarters of the Earth’s species, probably including dinosaurs.

That was the fifth mass extinction in Earth’s history.

Nature’s majesty is even more awesome deep in the universe, where suns explode and black holes swallow entire solar systems.

These photos released by DigitalGlobe, show the shoreline of Banda Aceh, in Indonesia, on June 23, 2004, above, and Dec. 28, 2004, below, after the tsunami.

“Mother Nature will win when she wants to,” said Kathryn Sullivan, the first U.S. woman to walk in space and a former chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

During three space-shuttle flights, Sullivan said, she would gaze through her “office window” down at Earth. She saw storms and hurricanes that revealed “the scale, the magnitude, the sheer power of Earth’s natural structure.”

When the forces of man and nature clash, she said, “you get reminded that the power of this planet is really there. We are, in our forces, implicitly nothing.”

Nature’s unleashed forces are still building this world.

Scientists say the more they study Earth and the universe, the more they’re struck by the imbalance of power between humanity and creation.

“Nature is much more powerful, and we have precious little ability to influence what happens at that scale,” said Rice University professor Neal Lane, former chief science adviser to President Clinton. “It’s a deeply humbling experience. We are able to control an infinitesimal amount of energy compared to the natural-energy events going on in the universe.”