Search Results for: cascadia subduction zone

Last week NOAA ran an interesting – make that significant – conference in Seattle focusing on the tsunami threat to the Pacific Northwest. Want to dig deeper? You can find the agenda and speaker biographies here. Soon there should be … Continue reading →

“The big one.” Perhaps you’ve heard that term used to refer to some possible future catastrophe.  All too easy to use “the” too cheaply. Somehow that implies a catastrophe that cannot be exceeded. Better to call it “a” big one. … Continue reading →

March 27th marks the 50th anniversary of the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America. It had a moment magnitude of 9.2 and affected some 200,000 miles of Alaska real estate, permanently raising some areas by as much as … Continue reading →

The stream of consciousness flowing through Monday’s sessions… (Don’t you wish you’d said it?) From John Plodinec, in an early plenary:  Resilience is not a display of weakness, but an exertion of strength. Resilience is knowing what your strengths are, … Continue reading →

Our nation owes much of its thinking on natural hazards and their risk management to a handful of hazards research centers sprinkled across the United States. One of the oldest and arguably the most influential of these is the Natural … Continue reading →

Wikipedia tells us that the fog of war is the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations. The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one’s own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, … Continue reading →

State-level requests for federal funding to cover disaster relief for hurricane Sandy are starting to come in. The New Jersey and New York requests alone total some $40B apiece. Expect further but smaller requests from Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. The … Continue reading →

As we approach the first anniversary of the March 11, 2011 Great Tohoku earthquake and the associated tsunami, the people of Japan are not feeling particularly earthquake-ready, as discussed in this morning’s print edition of the Washington Post. Hard to … Continue reading →

This week we’ve been looking at social scientists’ ten suggestions for policymakers. [Want to catch up? You can start here and work back through the thread…] At least one suggestion out of the ten has prompted reader reaction… 7. Incorporate … Continue reading →

The real world we live on does much if not most of its business through extreme events. In fact, it might be argued that extremes are a feature of many large systems. “A tempest in a teapot” is an oxymoron. … Continue reading →