natural disasters
sastyk | May 21, 2012These fragments I have shored against my ruins. - T. S. Eliot
The national news trucks hit my neighborhood last fall, as some of you will remember. When Tropical Storm Irene caused severe flooding and destruction in surrounding communities, and particularly to many of my neighbor's farms, we were briefly in the news. Then, as is normal for any community that has experienced disaster, came waves of volunteerism and assistance, and then a gradual diminishing of attention and interest, and the slow, long process of reclamation and rebuilding. As spring came around, the houses in the village…
tlambert | February 4, 2010There have been new developments in Leakegate, the scandal swirling about reporter Jonathan Leake, who deliberately concealed facts that contradicted the story he wanted to spin. Deltoid can reveal that Leake was up to the same tricks in his story that claims that the IPCC "wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters". Bryan Walker has the detailed dissection, but the short version is that Leake took one part of the discussion of one paper in the IPCC WG2 report and pretended that this was all it said, entirely ignoring the WG1 report and the discussion of other papers in the WG2…
khannula | November 9, 2009There's a great, new online news article by Science's Richard Kerr about the role of the Zipingpu Dam in last year's Wenchuan earthquake. A new article in Geophysical Research Letters (which I haven't read - my library doesn't have access to GRL) tests the plausibility of water as a trigger for the Wenchuan quake, and concludes that the weight of the water, combined with its penetration into the fault zone, might have made the difference.
There have been a number of studies in the past decade or so that suggest that earthquakes can be triggered by little things, such as the passage of…
grrlscientist | October 1, 2009Hey everyone: here's the coolest news in the world! My colleague and friend, Chris Rowan was interviewed streaming (and live) by BBC News radio and television on their program, World, Have Your Say [1 October, 1305-1400 EDT]. The interviewer investigated the (lack of) predictability of natural disasters, especially earthquakes and tsunamis. If you missed the program, it is now available here, for only the next seven days, so download it to your ipod now or stream it.
grrlscientist | October 1, 2009Hey everyone: here's the coolest news in the world! My colleague and friend, Chris Rowan is being interviewed streaming (and live) by BBC News radio and television on their program, World, Have Your Say [1300-1400 EDT], and the topic will investigate the (lack of) predictability of natural disasters, especially earthquakes and tsunamis. Go there now to hear him (and live blog it, too).
khannula | July 15, 2009While I was teaching my reworked upper division gen ed class earlier this summer, I decided to use a discussion technique that I hadn't used before: the
"http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/gallerywalk/index.html">gallery walk. It worked so well that I'm trying to figure out where else it might be useful.
The idea behind the gallery walk is pretty simple: students are divided into several groups, and work their way around a series of stations at which they add to a list of answers to a question (or whatever the task at each station involves). I had used the technique as a participant in a…
khannula | May 17, 2009In the news this week:
Andy Revkin at the NY Times has a news story and a blog post about the UN's new report assessing disaster risk. One of the experts quoted in his story sent him a comment with a lot of concern about the promotional video. Dave Petley (who writes Dave's Landslide Blog) looked at the report, and criticizes its assessment of landslide hazards. I haven't looked at the report myself (and it's long, unfortunately, so there's no way I'll be able to digest it in time for class this week), but I will try to keep the criticisms in mind when I do.
I had no idea that there was a…