Mount Etna Erupts

A lab asignment I was working on only yesterday, asked me what volcano has had the most eruptions since 79 a.d. It's ironic that a day later I find this image on reddit of that same volcano erupting. Mount Etna in Italy erupted earlier today spewing ash on nearby towns. The last big eruption was in 1992, and because Etna is the most active volcano in Europe we would all have to think mitigation strategies are cutting edge in the surrounding communities. Right?

While We Are Freezing Here..

While we are freezing in Wisconsin with frigid early temperatures, the UK is experiencing crazy winter storms. The Guardian reports that 100mph winds are battering Scotland and northern England and that severe flooding is next. Above is a clip of the strong winds pushing tall waves past the barriers. I think its interesting to see the power that the walls can withstand. Man made barriers such as these are great for defense, but as with most everything else in life, it has its draw backs. As a matter of fact, one of my research projects focuses on the formation of the Duluth baymouth bar. Looking at historical aireal data, you can see how the feature directs sediment carry and coastal erosion. However, this seems like an instance where the benefit of having the barrier greatly outweighs the negatives. Those waves are massive.

Photograph:Environment Agency showing the warning the UK is under

This other image I ripped from the guardians site shows the areas under severe flood warning. As you can see most of the map is painted red. Along with the snow and cold winter conditions we have been experiencing in the states, it seems that weather has been pretty wild lately. I acknowledge that this could be due to me following it more!

Tornadoes in the Midwest

This week was yet another substantial week for hazard events. The Midwest was ravaged by a serious of tornadoes Sunday. At least 1500 homes are said to be damaged or destroyed. Below is a time lapse video of a tornado rolling through Indianapolis.

The weatherman from a local news station mentioned that it is rare for this event to be this late in the year and this far north. This brings a real interesting topic to light. How will we know to change mitigation strategies change in light of global climate change? I am not declaring this as an event of global warming, but if we see severity in weather events increase rapidly, how could we plan effective strategies to minimize damage? Being proactive is the first step and an important concept to learn from studying hazard mitigation.

Aid for the Phillipines

While the US continues to dole out relief aid to China's neighbors hit by a massive typhoon, China somehow finds itself without money to spare. Originally only offering $100,000, after some heckling China has pledged $1.6 million in cash and materials- still dwarfed by the United States' $20 million. CBS reports that even Ikea (the Swedish furniture chain) has put more money forth.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/philippines-typhoon-relief-efforts-china-gives-less-aid-than-ikea/

Leave it to Stephen Colbert to make sure China's stinginess gets noticed. On the Colbert Report the other night, Stephen called on the nation to "kick China's ass at being compassionate". Viewers were urged to pledge through text message. And sure enough, he rallied enough people to beat out China's donation. The first one anyways.

Typhoon Haiyan Mapped

Looking for more news about the native termed Typhoon Yolanda, I stumbled across a link that gets me excited as a geographer. Max Fisher at The Washington Post wrote this article: 8 maps that explain why Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines so hard.

The maps he gathered from sources such as MapsoftheWorld.com, The News Republic, and the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources really help the average reader get an advanced understanding of the situation. Here is my favorite map of the link. It is good background knowledge, as there will be more posts to come about hazard mitigation of this event.

Typhoon Haiyan's power at different stages across the West Pacific

Disaster in the Phillipines

Typhoon Haiyan

Unless you've been absolutely starved of news this past week, you have probably heard about Typhoon Haiyan devastating regions of the Philippines. The Typhoon formed on November 3rd and made landfall on the Philippine island of Samar of November 7th. Haiyah had winds of 190-195mph at landfall, making it the strongest tropical cyclone to make landfall in world history.

This is a hard topic to cover as you can imagine, due to the shear size and impact of the event.We discussed the event in class from a behavior based view to better understand its impact. The structure of the storm played a big part. It was considered a well defined storm meaning that en route to Manillia and Tacloban winds may blow strong North until the eye focuses on the town. Then things will calm down only to get back up to speed in the other directions. Not many structures can stand up to that. Additionally the storm did not stick to the forecasted path. While Philippine major roadways are already packed, the additional surge of people pre landfall, did not help the matter.

My group discussed the additional factors that made this storm so deadly. Geography of the island made it nearly impossible to get out of the storms way. The options seemed to be to go to higher ground far inland where you have no shelter and could face landslides or go to the community shelter buildings that were only a half mile inland and composed of brick and mortar(which were inundated by the storm surge or had collapsed by wind intensity anyways). We also located in various news articles that officials did not relay the hazard rating of the storm so that the local population in Tacloban could understand the seriousness. Although locals have performed tsunami drills, the communication was not there. On top of everything this is a developing country. Property loss and human life loss are more impactful and slower to recover than if the country was a LDC or MDC.

Experts are divided on the impact of global warming on increased storm intensity, but if this is any indication, the geography of the Philippines make it susceptible either way.

Thanks to the growth in popularity of the world largest encyclopedia, Typhoon Haiyan is covered extensively here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Haiyan

More to come with more research.

Yosemite Hazards Vol 3

While in California, we had to give a 20 minute presentation on a topical research area of our choice. My presentation was about using LiDAR to measure fuel loads of forest canopies. Others spoke about native inhabitants of the Yosemite Vally, giant redwoods, and animal species. One topic that I found very interesting was presented to us by fellow classmate Jerrod. He told us of the ongoing efforts to prevent nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Japan. I thought this was an event worth briefly discussing.

Failure at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant occurred on March 11th of 2011. It was result of the plant being hit by the tsunami triggered by the Tohoku earthquake. It is reported as the largest nuclear incident since Chernobyl. Source.

Although I will admit, I am not religious in following news, I like to believe that when a situation has the ability to scar the planet like Chernobyl, I will be at least aware of it. Whether I should blame myself, or Brian Williams (love the guy) can be saved for another blog. I just wanted to point out some of the key details of this event, and I'll start with a map.

The green circle around fukushima is an area that was (and could be still) under radiation watch, however the main thing I wanted to point out, is that the blue colored areas on the map represent the ocean. Oceans are known to produce some wave action which can be greatly amplified by hurricanes and earthquake induced waves. I know, I am reading like a jackass. But I guess it makes me a little worried that there are people with significant sums of money who can make decisions like this that have the ability to change the planet.

I understand there are benefits to the location. A big one was the vast water supply to cool reactors. And I know that it has produced a great amount of electricity for the people of Japan. I just wish with such high stakes, they could have built the sea wall with some extra generosity. (Their sea wall was 10 meters high, while the tsunami threw a wave of 13 meters)

Yosemite Hazards Vol 2

Another hazard I took the liberty of identifying while in the park, was rock falls! On our second day in the park, we were lucky enough to have the sole park geologist give us a tour, and grease the geomorph skids for the following days to come. On our walk through the valley meadows, he pointed out rock falls and their hazardous nature.

He told us how comfortable we should feel in our tarp tents located closer to the middle of the valley. He told us that there is at around a dozen rock falls in a year, and a significant one in a decade. We stayed in Curry Village. A few years back, there was tarp tents built closer to the valley walls. They are not there anymore because a house or two got steam rolled by a car sized boulder. When going back to the village, I walked towards the south and closer to the wall. The steam rolled huts were replaced by an ampitheatre. They found that there was a significant risk and so they started building the huts closer to the center of the valley.

Having such a large economy fed from tourism, we can only expect growth. So an interesting question to ask is: how long until we are forced to flirt with higher risk property?

The link below is the source I've used for tourism numbers.
http://www.nps.gov/yose/naturescience/park-statistics.htm

Yosemite Hazards Vol 1

As I stated earlier, we did research on the El Capitan moraine. It's interesting to think about, as (due to Nat'l Park restrictions) being able to perform research there is not an easy thing to arrange. That can be one claim to this University's greatness, but anyways. 

We used a geographic technique called ground penetrating radar (GPR). I have been using this technology for a year now and it is one of the best ways to analyze subsurface stratigraphy. We use this technology to non invasively see how layers have been built upon each other over thousands of years. So you can guess why we used it. We were(/are) looking to uncover more information about the geologic history of the area: specifically in the valley.

But this moraine has an interesting story to it. In the early human development of Yosemite Valley, flooding was a big problem. The merced river would tend to get backed up behind the moraine and flood out everything. Bugs were also a big issue as the area would get almost swampy. To rid themselves of this problem, park officials blew up the moraine to make way for the Merced River. Fast forward a century and some change and we get the picture below.

(erosion)

That is a significant amount of erosion in a relatively short amount of time. It's interesting to have evidence of something we have changed for our convenience, to have it come back and bite us.

Since we now see that this is a problem, park officials want to restore the El Cap moraine and build it up to its original state. But here is the moral question: Is it better to restore the moraine and deal with floods? Or to not touch the moraine. Its an easier question without knowing that this park attracts around 4 million tourists annually, bringing in an insane amount of money.

I realize this isn't as directly hazard related as other posts, but I think it deals with the same relationship we find in other situations. Risk v. benefit. Oh and here's an ad that I am in for GPR equipment. Coming to a geophysics magazine near you!

I'm the third GPR professional from the left holding one of the
antennae. Credit to Harry Jol for the photography! 

Return from Yosemite/ Fire update

A few days ago I returned from my ten days out west. This was part of a special topics class where students from both the geography and English departments come together for a special trip designed to engage students in unfamiliar practices. For instance, part of the time spent out west was spent in San Francisco where we learned about beat poetry and its cultural influence in the 1950's. After five days on the coast, we headed inland to Yosemite. Here we conducted research on the El Cap moraine, and learned an incredible amount about the geologic history of Yosemite Valley. Looking back on it now while having hazards in my head, there were a couple very good examples of natural hazards. Enough for a couple posts about it! But before discussing any of that, I would like to post about the fire conditions, because that is the hot topic surrounding Yosemite. While in the visitor center, I snapped a few pictures of the fire maps which I'll show below. I might even have some charred Yosemite landscape pictures!

This is a simple map of the first status in Yosemite at September 21st. At the time having burned up over 250 thousand acres.

Fire in Yosemite

Yosemite Rim Fire

During the time of this first post, the most relevant environmental happening is the fire burning through Yosemite. This will be a story I will get to witness up close and personally during my planned trip to Yosemite National Park September 21st through the 29th.
The fire started from a hunter who started an illegal fire which got out of control. Currently, it is 84% contained and although that percentage may sound alright to a college student, the fire will still burn and smolder through the park causing more smoke and more acreage lost. The biggest hazards that exist in the park are smoke weakened trees, and burning stump holes. Park officials ask that if having to drive through, one should not leave the roadway or enter the burned area on foot.


This picture taken Thursday, August 5th show half dome in Yosemite, clouded by smoke. Image courtesy USGS

Being that this is an environmental hazard blog, it is important to discuss how this may affect us. With the current level of containment, tourists may be inconvenienced by road closures and smoke. The risks are dealt with by park officials and the firefighters who have to suppress the flames. That is the quick and dirty of the situation, but the long standing human/environment relationship we have with wildfires goes back far back into history and that is subject of analysis in this blog.

The popular opinion will leave a negative connotation with fire. And why not? Fires are all consuming and have immense power to destroy. What popular opinion fails to recognize, is that throughout earths history wildfires have occurred with frequency and have been crucial to the succession of forest ecosystems. Fire was essential and welcomed by forest ecosystems to remove dead materials, fertilize the soils, and allow room for new plants to flourish. Many plants have a direct need for fire. For example: the jack pine and the sequoia tree have serotinous (late blooming) cones which covered in a thick resin. When a fire comes through, the resin is softened and the cone is allowed to open an release the seeds. More reasons can be found at the link below.
http://creationrevolution.com/2012/06/plants-that-need-fire-to-survive/

Where the natural frequencies of fires have stopped is where humans started finding reasons to suppress fires. In Yosemite, we felt the need for more vacation huts and tourist shops, thus the need to protect its value. Enter the age of fire suppression. Unfortunately when dead and dry materials don't get burned off, they will continue to accumulate. Eventually we get a vast supply of fuels that is ready to go at the spark of a match.

What to take away from this, is that our human need to succeed and grow and control has big implications. Thanks to the growth in power of the scientific community, we are beginning to convey the importance of studying human-environment relationships.



Prelude

Hey everyone! My name is Dave, and I am a Junior at University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire. Throughout the next couple weeks I will be bringing you a smorgasbord of news events, links and articles relating to hazards around the world.

But let it be known, this is not a doomsday blog! This is a blog of concentrated, unbiased news and thorough analysis of the activity mother earth is throwing at us and the many ways in which we as a society respond. For educational purposes only. And although I will be describing serious topics, I will make the effort to keep the blog light-hearted and occasionally laced with humor (hopefully not offending anyone in the process).

Although, his comedic routine below may not be align with modern views of  human/earth interaction, the late and great George Carlin had quite the way with words. Hopefully, it warms you up to some of our topics and hopefully it makes you chuckle. Enjoy!

More to come!