Natural Disasters60
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Collecting Data Offshore Alaska, But Just Barely
One of the core objectives of our project is to image the part of the plate tectonic boundary that locks up and then ruptures to produce great earthquakes. To examine deep parts of the interface between the Pacific plate and the North American plate in the Aleutian subduction zone, we need to go as close…
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Lurking Under Bangladesh: The Next Great Earthquake?
Beneath Bangladesh: The Next Great Earthquake? from Earth Institute on Vimeo. After the recent great quakes that have swept away entire coastlines and cities in Japan, Haiti and Sumatra, scientists are now looking hard at the nation that may suffer the gravest threat of all: Bangladesh. A new documentary from the Earth Institute follows seismologists as they trace signs of…
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Summoning ocean bottom seismometers from the deep
After leaving our seismometers on the seafloor offshore Alaska for a few days to record sound waves generated by the air guns of the R/V Langseth, we returned to collect them. The recovery of OBS always involves a certain amount of suspense.
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Climate information and disasters: two interviews
Jan Egeland and Madeleen Helmer talk about the value of forecasts in disaster preparation.
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Climate Information Crucial to Help Reduce Disaster Risk
Forecasts can play an invaluable role in helping humanitarian agencies and governments plan for and prevent disasters, according to a new report published by Earth Institute’s IRI and its international partners.
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Mapping the Alaska Megathrust
Two tectonic plates converge along a 2,500-kilometer-long subduction zone offshore southern Alaska. Stress builds up at the contact between these plates, which is released in large, destructive earthquakes like the recent event offshore Japan. One of the big conundrums about these settings is how large of an area locks up on the contact between these…
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17th Annual International Sustainable Development Research Conference
“We have in the world today two dangerously different views of the future,” the view of natural scientists and the view of economists, says Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute and a keynote speaker at the 17th annual International Sustainable Development Conference.
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Rising Seas Pushing Island Nations to the Brink
Rising sea levels caused by global warming could displace millions of people worldwide who are living on low-lying coastlines, and it may prove fatal to some small island nations. At a conference at Columbia Law School, legal experts explored the implications for the people whose homelands could become uninhabitable within a matter of decades.
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The Confounding Economics of Natural Disaster Shocks
Something seems to be amiss with the way standard economics views the outcomes of natural disasters. This post i placed in OECD Insights and in Earth Magazine discusses some of the puzzles posed by the interaction between extreme events and different societies.
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