Blogs

The French Riviera enjoys a wonderful climate. No surprise that all those movie stars, sports heroes, and super models hang out in places like Monaco, Nice, Cannes and Fréjus.   OK --  maybe not so many rich and famous spend time in Fréjus, but it is the setting for today’s blog, so bear with me.

There will be the inevitable speculation about whether the earthquake yesterday in South Carolina was related to fluid reinjection.  One way to think about this is to look at the drilling sites in the United States that may have reinjection wells associated with them.  I show such a map below that originates from here.  You can see that the number of wells on the border of South Carolina and Georgia (where the earthquake occurred) is rather low, by comparison with other parts of the country. 

An unusual event in South Carolina just occurred, a magnitude 4.1 event.  At the present time, there is no reason to think this is anything but a relatively rare event.  However, it should also be recalled that Charleston, South Carolina was destroyed by a major earthquake on August 31, 1886.  Estimates place the magnitude in excess of 7, possibly as large as 7.3 moment magnitude.  So while unusual, earthquakes are not unknown in this area. 

Check out the course I am teaching this winter quarter at the University of California, Davis, California.  Weekly commentary is here.  The lectures can be found in power point form here.  The lectures are by and large taken from material in Wikipedia.

A headline in USA Today proclaims that "Britain's Flood Crisis Deepens, Thames Bursts its Banks".  Meanwhile California is in the midst of a record drought, recent rains notwithstanding.  While not necessarily the result of global warming, the historic conditions in different parts of the globe remind us that disasters can come in many forms, not just earthquakes or typhoons.  The economic damages from t

March 27, 2014 marks the 50-th anniversary of the Great Alaska Earthquake and Tsunami.  Although perhaps not an occasion for cake and ice cream, it certainly is an occasion for thought regarding both historical and future earthquake disasters. Who can say, 50 years from now we might be reminiscing about the Great Cascadia Earthquake and Tsunami of 2015.    

This term as I teach the course on risk and natural disasters, I am using the social site to store the lectures, as well as to report on disasters occurring during this period of time.  The eruption of Mt. Sinabung on Northern Sumatra is the most damaging event at the moment.

Have you ever heard of China’s Three Gorges Dam? That’s that mega project intended to control the Yangtze River.  At 1.3 miles long, 610 feet high, and possessing the hydroelectric capacity of eleven Hoover Dams, the thing is sometimes called “China’s Other Great Wall”.

Not much blogging this week.  I am at the annual AGU meeting in San Francisco.  I blogged about this some time ago.  It is the major meeting in our field.  My first was in the fall of 1974.  I got off the elevator at the mezzanine level of the old Jack Tar hotel and I saw a huge crowd -- maybe 300 scientists.  That was 39 years ago.  The meeting this week has over 25,000 attendees.  It fills pretty much the entire Moscone center in San Francisco.  Quite a change!  Many great talks on earthquakes, climate change, typhoons, and other disasters.

This coming winter quarter at UC Davis, I will be teaching a course on disasters.  Because most of the books on this subject cost well over $100 US, and even over $150 US, I decided to produce an online course from sources at Wikipedia pages and various US government sources.  Since these are subject to common use licenses, reproducing subject matter from those courses is within the varous terms of use restrictions.  I will be making the lectures openly available here.  Interested students and faculty can feel free to us