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Displaying 15 of about 1576 resultsThe disappearance of the ephemeral lake has made earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault even more unpredictable. In the arid expanse of what is today Southern California, a vast lake once waxed and waned. Lake Cahuilla spanned thousands of square kilometers before drying away to nothing and then reappearing in a decades-long cycle that repeated ov…
The Emerald Isle has far fewer earthquakes than neighboring Britain. Now scientists think they know why.Ireland and Britain should be, seismologically speaking, equally boring. The two islands lie thousands of kilometers from the nearest plate boundary and are not volcanic hot spots. But though the ground rarely rumbles in Ireland, neighboring Britain e…
On 5 September 2022, Luding County in Sichuan Province, China was struck by a shallow (depth=16 km) Ms=6.8 earthquake. The area consists of steep mountain terrain, and the earthquake occurred at the end of the rainy season, so landslides were inevitable. In a new paper just published in the journal Landslides, Ma et al. (2023) provide an initial descrip…
Large earthquakes not only directly damage buildings but also trigger debris flows, which cause secondary damage to buildings, forming a more destructive earthquake-debris flow disaster chain. A quantitative assessment of building vulnerability is essential for damage assessment after a disaster and for pre-disaster prevention. Using mechanical analysis…
The epicentre of Morocco’s devastating earthquake on 8 September was in the High Atlas Mountains, about 71km south-west of Marrakesh. Moina Spooner, from The Conversation Africa, asked Jesús Galindo-Zaldivar, who has been carrying out research on the formation of the Atlas mountains and the geology of the area, about the factors which led to this situat…
GENEVA, 21 May 2013 - Senior government officials from developing small island states and climate change experts have warned of a massive increase in human, economic and material losses in these countries if risk reduction measures are not taken urgently to mitigate the impacts of major hazards and climate change.
The warning was issued by repres…
GENEVA, 25 April 2013 - The Head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), Margareta Wahlström, today extended condolences to the families of those who have lost loved ones in the collapse of an eight-storey building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and reiterated that Dhaka is also in a high risk earthquake zone.
In meetings last year in Dhaka, Ms.…
GENEVA, 11 April 2012 - Following a massive earthquake earlier today in the Indian Ocean and the threat of a tsunami, Indonesian President and UNISDR Global Disaster Risk Reduction Champion, Susilo Bambang Yudhyono, told the press, "Our early warning system is working well". There were no tsunamis in Banda Aceh or other places which were hard hit by the…
GENEVA, 12 June 2012 - UNISDR chief Margareta Wahlström today congratulated Switzerland for getting ready to face the consequences of a major earthquake even if the last one happened over 1,000 years ago.
"It is good to see Switzerland setting an example for earthquake preparedness. Taking this threat seriously and involving its neighbors in an ambitio…
PARIS, 20 November 2012 - It's a scenario from hell which could rival the 2010 Haitian earthquake in terms of human losses.
Conservative estimates are that the next big earthquake could result in 100,000 dead, 200,000 injured and one to two million people displaced in the fabled Kathmandu Valley where memories live on of the 1934 earthquake which took…
SENDAI, 9 October 2012 - UNISDR today recognized Sendai, the largest city in Japan's tsunami-struck region of Tohoku, as a role model for the Making Cities Resilient Campaign for "promoting community-based disaster risk reduction and empowering people to act on disaster risk reduction."
Following the Great Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in March 2011, Se…
Seismic risk has taken on a different meaning this week with the trial opening in Italy of six scientists charged with failing to predict the L’Aquila earthquake that killed 309 people in 2009 and left 70,000 people homeless. The scientists and one official are charged with manslaughter.
The trial puts under the spotlight one of the most difficult area…
BEIRUT/GENEVA, 21 October 2011 – UNISDR Chief, Margareta Wahlstrom, today welcomed the news that both the Lebanese Army and the National Institute of Administration, the country’s civil service, are to make disaster risk reduction a core element of staff training.
She said: “This is a welcome signal from the new government of the importance it attaches…
By Yuki Matsuoka and Etsuko Okazaki
KOBE, 17 October 2011 - Recognizing the importance of risk reduction, the Japanese city of Saijo, located in Ehime prefecture on Shikoku Island, expanded their disaster risk reduction (DRR) education program to train children and young people to be future leaders in DRR. On 14 October, a lecture program was organize…
Glacial lakes form when meltwater is trapped behind a dam, usually glacial ice, bedrock or a type of moraine (terminal types being an unconsolidated pile of debris at the maximum extent of the glacier). When a dam fails, the resulting sudden release of a large volume of water is known as an outburst flood, having catastrophic consequences on the environ…