When the volcano Tambora erupted in Indonesia in 1815, as many as 100,000 people perished as a result of the blast and an ensuing famine caused by the destruction of rice fields on Sumbawa and neighboring islands. Gases and dust particles ejected into the atmosphere changed weather patterns around the world, resulting in the infamous ''year without a summer'' in North America, food riots in Eur…
n March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off Japan's coast, triggering a powerful tsunami. The massive destruction that resulted proved that not even sophisticated, industrialized nations are immune from nature's fury. Written to take some of the mystery out of the earth's behavior, this encyclopedia chronicles major natural disasters that have occurred around the Pacific Rim, an are…
Volcanic unrest is a complex multi-hazard phe-nomenon of volcanism. Although it is fair toassume that probably all volcanic eruptions arepreceded by some form of unrest, the cause andeffect relationship between subsurface processesand resulting unrest signals (geophysical orgeochemical data recorded at the ground surface,phenomenological observations) is unclear andsurrounded by uncertainty (e.…
Effective volcanic crisis communication is afundamental component of the concepts of miti-gation, disaster management, and disaster riskreduction. As part of this communication pro-cess, a number of tools have emerged that areregularly employed in volcanic crises that assistin the structure and formulation of communica-tive processes. This chapter focuses on four vitallessons learnt from key cr…
The haunts of my youth have vanished, in two senses — they rest under layers of mental debris, accumulated along life’s way, and under the lava that flowed from the flanks of Mount Helgafell, “Holy Mountain,” in Iceland’s Westman Islands in 1973. These facts evoke in me both pure curiosity and a poignant sense of loss. Where is my home? As have so many ot…
What was causing this upheaval of the elements? Many Europeans thought aboutthis question. These wonders were documented in newspaper reports, weather diaries,publications of learned societies, scholarly monographs, and private communications ofthe period. The fact that these phenomena were widely discussed and reflected upon isindicative of the great interest contemporaries had in them.3Emotio…