The Dynamics of Disaster
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"If you are an amateur weather geek, disaster wonk, or budding student of earth sciences, you will want to read this book." —Seattle Times
In 2011, there were fourteen natural calamities that each destroyed over a billion dollars’ worth of property in the United States alone. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy ravaged the East Coast and major earthquakes struck in Italy, the Philippines, Iran, and Afghanistan. In the first half of 2013, the awful drumbeat continued—a monster supertornado struck Moore, Oklahoma; a powerful earthquake shook Sichuan, China; a cyclone ravaged Queensland, Australia; massive floods inundated Jakarta, Indonesia; and the largest wildfire ever engulfed a large part of Colorado.
Despite these events, we still behave as if natural disasters are outliers. Why else would we continue to build new communities near active volcanoes, on tectonically active faults, on flood plains, and in areas routinely lashed by vicious storms?
A famous historian once observed that "civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice." In the pages of this unique book, leading geologist Susan W. Kieffer provides a primer on most types of natural disasters: earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, landslides, hurricanes, cyclones, and tornadoes. By taking us behind the scenes of the underlying geology that causes them, she shows why natural disasters are more common than we realize, and that their impact on us will increase as our growing population crowds us into ever more vulnerable areas.
Kieffer describes how natural disasters result from "changes in state" in a geologic system, much as when water turns to steam. By understanding what causes these changes of state, we can begin to understand the dynamics of natural disasters.
In the book’s concluding chapter, Kieffer outlines how we might better prepare for, and in some cases prevent, future disasters. She also calls for the creation of an organization, something akin to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but focused on pending natural disasters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Earth's treacherous energies are tracked in this informative, unexcitable primer on natural disasters. Geologist and MacArthur genius Kieffer, proprietor of the Geology in Motion blog, surveys a slew of spectacular cataclysms the Tohoku earthquake, superstorm Sandy, tornadoes, volcanoes, floods, droughts, even a Martian landslide and the scientific principles and mechanisms that generate them. She treats these varied upheavals within the unifying framework of analyzing "changes of state" that transform a seemingly placid landscape or seascape into deadly chaos: the sudden liquefaction of the ground by a quake's tremor; the unnoticeably gentle ocean swell that piles up into a raging tsunami at the shore; the rock-face that shears off a mountainside in an eye-blink. Kieffer adroitly explains these phenomena with homespun analogies to exploding bicycle tires, ripples in a kitchen sink, and the like, and recalls her unruffled firsthand glimpses of the Mount St. Helens eruption and other disasters. There's not a huge conceptual payoff to her grand unified theory of disasters; the particular details of how they go about devastating the world in their separate, idiosyncratic ways are more captivating than the common physical laws that underlie the mayhem. Kieffer's measured tone doesn't hard-sell the drama of geocatastrophe, but she presents a clear, engagingly wonky introduction to the field. 40 illus. and photos.