Category Archives: geohazards

The Cuyahoga River burned today for the first time in 51 years. Here’s what we can learn from it.

Posted on August 25, 2020 by Anne Jefferson

How many of you had “Cuyahoga River catches fire” on your 2020 bingo card? Yet that’s what happened today.  A tanker-car collision/fire near the Cuyahoga River in Akron this morning spilled burning fuel into a storm sewer and then the … Continue reading →

Categories: by Anne, environment, geohazards, geology, hydrology, public science, society

Spooky seismic action at a distance: moderate earthquakes in western US cause submarine landslides in the Gulf of Mexico

Posted on May 27, 2020 by Chris Rowan

This is such a cool study, and such an interesting result! Earthquakes triggering landslides is not a surprise, but surface waves from a magnitude 5.5 earthquake in the Gulf of California triggering a landslide in the Gulf of Mexico (1500 … Continue reading →

Categories: earthquakes, geohazards, paper reviews

Two reflections on the largest earthquake yet recorded, 60 years later.

Posted on May 26, 2020 by Chris Rowan

It has been 60 years since a magnitude 9.5 earthquake struck the Chilean coast near Valdivia. The stats for this earthquake remain pretty mind-blowing even today. It is still the largest earthquake ever recorded – over 20% of the Earth’s seismic energy … Continue reading →

Categories: earthquakes, geohazards, tectonics

A Riverine Flooding Cookbook, Volume 1: Meteorological Floods

Posted on May 12, 2020 by Anne Jefferson

Meteorological floods are closely tied to the four mechanisms of atmospheric lifting (convection, frontal systems, convergence, and orographic) that produce cooling, saturation, and precipitation. As climate change warms the atmosphere, enabling it to hold more water, and shifts atmospheric circulation patterns, there is the potential for more severe flooding and flooding in new places to result from any of these lifting mechanisms. Continue reading →

Categories: by Anne, geohazards, hydrology

New sonar data from around Anak Kratatau constrain size of December 2018 collapse

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Chris Rowan

BBC story here. These data indicate a smaller collapse, but also a shallower failure plane than expected, which allowed that smaller volume to still generate a devastating tsunami. Basically, when modelling this, different combinations of slide volume and failure angle … Continue reading →

Categories: geohazards, geophysics, volcanoes