Natural Hazards

Description

For professors and students of natural hazards or courses in earthquakes and volcanoes, Edward A. Keller and Robert H. Blodgett's treatment of fundamental scientific concepts addresses societal interactions and Earth processes.

Included with every text, the Hazard City CD-ROM gives instructors meaningful, easy-to-assign, and easy-to-grade assignments based on the idealized town of Hazard City.

Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction to Natural Hazards  

Chapter 2 Earthquakes  

Chapter 3 Tsunamis  

Chapter 4 Volcanoes  

Chapter 5 Flooding  

Chapter 6 Mass Wasting  

Chapter 7 Subsidence and Soil Movement

Chapter 8 Atmosphere and Severe Weather

Chapter 9 Hurricanes and Extratropical Cyclones

Chapter 10 Waves, Currents and Coastlines

Chapter 11 Climate and Climate Change

Chapter 12 Wildfires

Chapter 13 Impacts and Extinctions

Appendix A Minerals

Appendix B Rocks

Appendix C Maps and Related Topics

Appendix D How Geologists Determine Geologic Time

Glossary

References

Index

Features

The Text

• Five Fundamental Concepts for Understanding Natural Processes as Hazards — Chapter 1 introduces five concepts that unify the diverse topics the student will by studying: Predictability of Hazards; Risk Analysis; Links between Hazards; Progression of Hazards from Disasters to Catastrophes; and Minimizing Consequences of Hazards. To make these connections even more clear, at the end of each chapter, the chapter's topic is summarized in terms of these concepts.

• Student-focused chapter structure — Includes consistent learning aids to maximize students' understanding of the material and review of major topics:

– Learning objectives

– Chapter summary

– Detailed references at the end of the text

– Key terms at the end of each chapter

– Review questions

– Critical-thinking questions that stimulate students to think about some of the important issues in the text and relate these to their lives and society.

• Survivor Stories – Feature interviews with people who have experienced hazards first-hand and lived to talk about it.  

• Professional Stories – Feature interviews with professionals working in the field of natural hazards focusing on their experiences and their recommendations to the students.  

• Case Studies – In-depth profiles of significant events.  

Instructor and Student Resources

• Prentice Hall Environmental Geology Video Series – This DVD contains over 35 video segments featuring the results of a dynamic and changing Earth environment.  These focused segments average one to three minutes in length and feature processes such as:

– Surveillance camera earthquake video

– Volcanic destruction

– Urban Flooding

– Dust Storms

– Landslide devastation

– Hurricane storm surge

– Heartland Tornadoes

– Giant Sinkholes and much more

• Instructor's Resource Center on CD-ROM, with PowerPoint Presentations and Animations — Includes three PowerPoint presentations for each chapter: (1) Lecture outline: "plug-and-play" lecture presentations based on the outline of the text to get you up and running as quickly as possible; (2) Art only: every figure and most of the photos in the text, in order, pre-loaded onto PowerPoint slides; (3) Animations: high quality animations of key geologic processes (see below for more details). Also included are all illustrations and a selection of photos for the text in 16-bit, low-compression JPEG files. All images are manually adjusted for color, brightness, and contrast

• PH Geoscience Animations — Created through a unique collaboration among five of Prentice Hall's leading geoscience authors, these animations may represent a most significant leap forward in lecture presentation. Available on the Instructor Resource Center on CD. They are provided as both Flash files and, for your convenience, pre-loaded into PowerPoint slides. The list of animations includes:

Convergent Margins

Seafloor Spreading

Faults

Transform Faults

Foliation

Folding

P & S Waves

Stream Processes

Angular Unconformity and Nonconformity

Global Warming

Beach Drift

Seismograph Operations

Breakup of Pangea

Nebular Hypothesis

Oxbow Lake Formation

Crater Lake

Igneous Features

Hydrologic Cycle

Tidal Cycle

Glacial Processes/Ice Budget

Relative Dating

Tectonic Settings of Volcanic Activity

Glacial Processes/Plucking and Moraines

Wave Motion

Coastal Processes/Jetties, Groins, Breakwaters

Ocean Circulation

Accretion of Terranes

Global Atmospheric Circulation

Cyclones and Anticyclones

HazardCity: Assignments in Applied Geology 3e–Included with every text, Hazard City gives instructors meaningful, easy-to-assign, and easy-to-grade assignments. Based on the idealized town of Hazard City, the assignments put students in the role of a practicing geologist–gathering and analyzing real data, evaluating risk, making assessments and recommendations. The third edition of this widely used CD contains new modules on Map Reading and Tsunami/Storm Surge.

– A new module  - Tsunamu/Storm Surge

Students evaluate the storm surge and tsunami hazard for Ocean City, an idealized coastal town near Hazard City. They examine the potential causes, effects and warning time for flooding by a storm surge or tsunami, and assess the need for evacuation, housing and post-flood reconstruction.

– Three sets of assessment questions for each activity–Multiple, parallel sets of assessment questions allow the instructor to quickly and easily alter the assignments each semester. This helps preserve the integrity of the assignments over a longer period of time.

– Thoroughly class tested –All activities have been refined through testing in both the traditional and online classroom.

– Substantial, critical thinking assignments – Each activity takes 30-90 minutes. The activities require students to gather and analyze real data, participate in real issues, encounter uncertainty, and make decisions.

– Easy grading for instructors:

All questions are multiple-choice, making them quick and easy to grade.

Solutions are available only via the Instructor's Manual, helping preserve integrity for assignments in later semesters.

– Student flexibility for submitting answers:

Using worksheets on the CD-ROM which students can print out, complete, and submit to the instructor;

Visiting the Hazard City Website at http://www.hazcity.com, answering questions online, and printing a "certificate of completion" to hand in to instructor (the certificate indicates a raw score but does not provide solutions; these must be obtained from the instructor).

– Easy to assign –Each self-contained assignment encourages students to research, explore, learn on their own, and think.

Map Reading:  Builds map-reading skills and gives students the confidence they need to solve map-based problems in later assignments.

Ground Water Contamination:  Students use field and laboratory data to prepare a contour map of the water table, determine the direction of ground water flow and map a contaminated area.

Volcanic Hazard Assessment: Researching volcanic hazards, collecting field information, and decision-making are all used to determine the potential impact of a volcanic eruption on different parts of Hazard City.

Landslide Hazard Assessment: Students research the factors that determine landslide hazard at five construction sites and make recommendations for development.

Earthquake Damage Assessment: Students research the effects of earthquakes on buildings, explore Hazard City, and determine the number of people needing emergency housing given an earthquake of specific intensity.

Flood Insurance Rate Maps: Flood insurance premiums are estimated using a flood insurance rate map, insurance tables and site characteristics.

Snowpack Monitoring: Students utilize climatic data to estimate variables that are key to flood control and water supply management.

Coal Property Evaluation: The potential value of a mineral property is estimated by learning about mining and property evaluation then applying that knowledge in a resource calculation.

Landfill Siting: Students use maps and geological data to determine if any of five proposed sites meet the requirements of the State Administrative Code for landfill siting. Shoreline Property Assessment:  Students visit four related water-front building sites–some developed and some not–and analyze the risk each faces due to shoreline erosion processes.

Author

Edward A. Keller

Ed Keller is a professor, researcher,  writer, and most importantly, mentor and teacher to undergraduate and graduate students. Currently, Dr. keller's students are working on earthquake hazards, how waves of sediment move through a river system following disturbance, and geologic controld on habitat to endangered southern steelhead trout. He was born and raised in California (Bachelor’s degree in Geology and Mathematics from California State University at Fresno, Master’s degree in Geology from University of California at Davis), it was while pursuing his Ph.D. in Geology from Purdue University in 1973 that Ed wrote the first edition of Environmental Geology, the text that became the foundation of the environmental geology curriculum. Ed joined the faculty of the University of California Santa Barbara in 1976 and has been there since, serving multiple times as the chair of both the Environmental Studies and Hydrologic Science programs. In that time he has been the author on over 100 articles, including seminal works on fluvial processes and tectonic geomorphology. Ed’s academic honors include the Don J. Easterbrook Distinguished Scientist Award, Geological Society of America (2004), Quatercentenary Fellowship from Cambridge University, England (2000), two Outstanding Alumnus Awards from Purdue University (1994, 1996), A Distinguished Alumnus Award from California State University at Fresno (1998), the Outstanding Outreach Award from Southern California Earthquake Center (1999).

Ed and his wife Valery, who brings clarity to his writing, love walks on the beach at sunset and when the night herons guard moonlight sand at Arrroyo Burro Beach in Santa Barbara.

Robert H. Blodgett

Bob Blodgett is Professor of Geology at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas, where he teaches natural hazards and disasters, environmental, physical, and historical geology, as well as environmental science, and manages the college’s Edwards Aquifer monitoring well and is physical sciences safety coordinator. Bob has nearly 25 years of teaching experience, including positions on the faculties of Ohio State University and Dickinson College.

He is a Licensed Professional Geoscientist and worked for six years in the state of Texas Public Drinking Water Program leading a team of scientists evaluating the vulnerability of drinking water to contamination, and for two years at the Texas Bureau of Economic Geology conducting environmental assessments of abandoned mined lands. His research on terrestrial sedimentary processes resulted in published papers on braided streams, ancient soils, and fossil burrows.

Bob has practical experience planning for and responding to natural hazards. While in the Air Force he served as the disaster preparedness officer for the remote Indian Mountain Air Force Station in Alaska, and for the underground Cheyenne Mountain Command post of the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs.

He traces his interest in natural hazards back to Alma Petrini, his second grade teacher in Detroit, whose lesson on volcanoes and earthquakes came alive with stories and pictures of her trips to Paricutin and Pompeii, and to lava samples that Gordon Macdonald, then director of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, sent him for his class project. These experiences led to a life-long interest in geology including three degrees, a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, an M.S. from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.

Bob and his partner Jeff, who helps him focus on the important things in life, enjoy traveling, exploring new restaurants, and making a home with their dog Mona.