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Large-scale earthquake hazards pose major threats to modern society, generating casualties, disrupting socioeconomic activities, and causing enormous economic loss across the world. Events, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, highlighted the vulnerability of urban cities to catastrophic earthquakes. Accurate assessment of earthquake-related hazards (both primary and secondary) is essential to mitigate and control disaster risk exposure effectively. To date, various approaches and tools have been developed in different disciplines. However, they are fragmented over a number of research disciplines and underlying assumptions are often inconsistent. Our society...
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From bestselling author Susan Casey, an awe-inspiring portrait of the mysterious world beneath the waves, and the men and women who seek to uncover its secrets “An irresistible mix of splendid scholarship, heart-stopping adventure writing, and vivid, visceral prose." —Sy Montgomery, New York Times best-selling author of The Soul of an Octopus For all of human history, the deep ocean has been a source of wonder and terror, an unknown realm that evoked a singular, compelling question: What’s down there? Unable to answer this for centuries, people believed the deep was a sinister realm of fiendish creatures and deadly peril. But now, cutting-edge technologies...
Earthquakes are a huge global threat. In thirty-six countries, severe seismic risks threaten populations and their increasingly interdependent systems of transportation, communication, energy, and finance. In this important book, Louise Comfort provides an unprecedented examination of how twelve communities in nine countries responded to destructive earthquakes between 1999 and 2015. And many of the book’s lessons can also be applied to other large-scale risks. The Dynamics of Risk sets the global problem of seismic risk in the framework of complex adaptive systems to explore how the consequences of such events ripple across jurisdictions, communities, and organizations in complex societie...
Today's globalised society highly depends on reliable infrastructure systems like transportation and telecommunication. This doctoral dissertation presents a methodology to identify critical road infrastructures. Critical road sections are those whose failure would entail large costs to society. The dissertation also accounts for aspects like multiple road disruptions and probabilities of failure. Baden-Wuerttemberg in Germany serves as a case study area.
1 AUK ISMAIL-ZADEH ,2, TOM BEER3 1 International Institute of Earthquake Prediction Theory and Mathematical Geophysics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Warshavskoye shosse 79-2, Moscow 113556, Russia; e-mail: aismail@mitp.ru 2 Geophysikalisches Institut, Universittit Karlsruhe, Hertzstr. 16, Karlsruhe 76187, Germany; e-mail: Alik.Ismail-Zadeh@gpi.uni-karlsruhe.de 3 CSIRO Environmental Risk Network, CSIRO Atmospheric Research, Aspendale, Vic. 3195 Australia; e-mail: Tom.Beer@csiro.au The world faces major threats to the sustainability of our planet. These threats are accompanied by the immediate dangers of natural and man-made disasters. Our vulnerability to them is greatly magnified with each p...
SYNER-G, a multidisciplinary effort funded by the European Union, allowed the development of an innovative methodological framework for the assessment of physical as well as socio-economic seismic vulnerability and risk at urban and regional level. The results of SYNER-G are presented in two books both published by Springer, the present and a second one, entitled “SYNER-G: Typology Definition and Fragility Functions for Physical Elements at Seismic Risk: Buildings, Lifelines, Transportation Networks and Critical Facilities”(*), which provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art of the fragility curves, an alternative way to express physical vulnerability of elements at risk. In this second ...
The 1755 earthquake and tsunami were influential not only in Portugal but in all European and North African countries where the devastating effects were felt. The entire world was deeply impressed and the discussion of its causes generated a large amount of scientific and metaphysical speculation. It inspired philosophers, poets and writers. The socio-economic consequences of the event were great and affected the future organization and development of Portugal. The possibility of a similar occurence urges society and the scientific community to reflect on its lessons. Audience This work is of interest to experts in seismology, earthquake engineering, civil protection, urban planning and it is a reference book for doctoral students.
This thesis focuses on the contemporary stress state of a continental rift structure, the Upper Rhine Graben, and its present-day reactivation and kinematic behaviour. The graben is currently characterised by relatively slow tectonic deformation accompanied by low to medium seismicity and ongoing subsidence. In this context, the reactivation potential of pre-existing faults associated with the graben structure is one of the main goals of this thesis. Three dimensional finite element modelling is used for simulating the stress state of the study area. Based on the evaluation of the fault reactivation potential, a possible contribution of mechanical earth modelling to earthquake hazard assessm...
Most of our knowledge about the physical structure and the chemical composition of the Earth's deep interior is inferred from seismic data. The interpretation of seismic waves generally follows the assumption that the Earth's physical structure is grossly layered and that fluctuations of the physical parameters within individual layers are smooth in structure and small in magnitude. While this view greatly facilitates the analytic and interpretative procedure, it is clearly at odds with evidence from outcrops and boreholes, which indicates that compositional, structural and petrophysical heterogeneity in the Earth prevails over a wide range of scales. This book is the first to unify three di...
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned t...