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Disaster Preparedness
18mins
“The fear of panic has killed more people than most disasters themselves.”
9mins
"Humans, like most mammals, tend to shut down in really frightening situations for which they have no training or prior experience. Researchers call it negative panic. People do nothing. They shut down."
A deep dive into missing data and the limitations of disaster databases.
Volcanologists warn that magma-filled vents evolve over time, leading to an underestimation of the number that might erupt — especially those capable of the biggest explosions
Decades ago, a disaster left three million acres of land uninhabitable and killed between 85,600 and 240,000 people. Chernobyl? No. Banqiao dam in China.
Lost in a building or underwater? A new muon-based navigation system could be your guide.
A new online religion is spreading misinformation and phony products.
Was it the enormous magnitude of the quake, or is the problem with the buildings?
A Carrington-magnitude event would kill millions, and cause trillions of dollars in damage. Sadly, it isn't even the worst-case scenario.
On the morning of June 30, 1908, an explosion of more than 10 megatons occurred above the sparsely populated Siberian Taiga. What caused the so-called Tunguska event?
When Cameroon's Lakes Monoun and Nyos exploded, they released clouds of carbon dioxide that suffocated everything in its wake.
A marine scientist explains the threat of the Loop Current, a 800-pound gorilla of Gulf hurricane risks.
1859's Carrington event gave us a preview of how catastrophic the Sun could be for humanity. But it could get even worse than we imagined.
Some of the coastal areas were not repopulated for millennia afterward, showing that there was a long-lasting memory of this tragic event.
We have a morbid curiosity about nautical disaster stories. The Irish "Wreck Viewer" offers a window into centuries of marine misfortune.
The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora is one of the reasons why Bryan Walsh sees supervolcanoes as the” single, biggest threat to the human race.”
The NSF’s new, cutting-edge solar observatory shows us the Sun as never before. Here’s why we need to know. On December 12, 2019, the world’s most powerful solar observatory — the National Science […]
As individuals, we scientists are all flawed. But the enterprise of science rises above our individual shortcomings. The enterprise of science is perhaps the greatest achievement in all of human […]
Whatever you do, don’t try to wash it away with water. Every few months, a volcanic eruption occurs on Earth, with lava flows and enormous plumes of volcanic ash. In 2015, […]
While it’s fresh in everyone’s mind, this is the best time to turn awareness into action. “Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing […]