On Monday, most of us were still trying to fathom what nine trillion gallons of water would feel like — that hydraulic cube over downtown Houston, four miles square and two miles high. And then the cube doubled to become the most extreme rain event in American history.

I’ve seen a volcano explode — the Mount St. Helens eruption of 1980, with 500 times the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I ran in fear ahead of the flames consuming Yellowstone National Park in 1988. And I spent months talking to the last survivors of the worst environmental disaster in our history, the 1930s Dust Bowl.

None of it compares with what we’ve experienced this past week in Texas. When normally sober and stoic scientists start draining the barrel of awful superlatives to describe a summer day off the Gulf Coast, it’s time to pay attention.

The question is: Will this be our shared moment, when raging nature makes all of us feel small, vulnerable and petty? Can there be a humbling, a dent in our hubris, in The Week the Earth Stood Still? And lest we view everything through our own national lens, more than 1,000 people have died thus far in catastrophic flooding in South Asia, with rain volumes 10 times the usual monsoon.