Details about my forthcoming talk to the Hong Kong Royal Geographical Society on 3rd April 2012

I will be giving a public lecture entitled “The Hazards of Geography: Earthquakes, Floods and Landslides” on 3rd April

A brief review of the Great Disasters of the 21st Century session at the AGU Fall meeting 2011

A brief review of a new paper that describes a newly discovered catastrophic landslide deposit in Tenerife.

Two articles have been published this week in Science Express, the rapid online version of the journal Science, on the mechanics of the rupture event of the M=9.0 Tohoku-Oki Earthquake in Japan earlier this year.  Both shed some light on the reasons why the earthquake was so immensely damaging.  In the first, Simons et al. (2011) (NB link is a pdf, as the two below) have investigated the magnitude of …

A rumour is circulating in Rome that a large earthquake will strike the city in the next few days. This post seeks to debunk the urban myth that is responsible for the panic.

A collection of interesting links to articles and sources of information related to natural hazards:

Given that natural hazards are at the forefront of the news at the moment, I thought it would be good to highlight three important forthcoming conferences at which we will learn a great deal more about recent and potential events: 1. European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2011 Next week is the annual EGU meeting in Vienna.  This will be the largest natural hazards meeting of the year, at which there …

Three videos to mark World Water Day

This post explores whether Friday’s magnitude 9 earthquake in offshore Sendai in Japan was a surprising event from a geological perspective, concluding that there are few aspects of this event that have not been observed elsewhere before.