Through The Sandglass

The Japanese tsunami: researching the aftermath

The differences in the coastal geomorphology along the Pacific coast of Tohoku in part controlled the impact of the Tohoku-oki tsunami. a. The steep sided valleys of the Sanriku coastline focussed the tsunami waves causing a run up height of approximately 40 m above sea level. b. In contrast along the low lying Sendai Plain, the wave height was much less but it travelled much further inland, with a  maximum inundation from the shoreline of 5.4 km. Image courtesy of Kazuhisa Goto (Chiba Institute) 

A couple of years ago, I wrote something of a rant on the topic of listening to geologists in order to save lives. The post, Ignoring tsunami records: hubris, complacency, or just human nature? was in the aftermath of the catastrophe in Japan and reflected on what could – should – have been learned from historical and geological testaments. Now, thanks to a research report in Geology Today on the papers published last year in a special issue of Sedimentary Geology, we have a view of what has now been learned, geologically at least, in the aftermath of the events of 2011.

The lead review paper in the journal, titled The future of tsunami research following the 2011 Tohoku-oki event, is by Kazuhisa Goto of Japan’s Planetary Exploration Research Center, Chiba Institute of Technology, and the International Research Institute of Disaster Science, Tohoku University, together with colleagues from Australia and the US. Their opening and closing comments are worthy of attention:

The 2011 Tohoku-oki tsunami was the first example of a large, low-frequency event occurring where historical and pre-historical tsunamis were already known to have occurred through historical… and geological evidence... Magnitudes of some of the historical earthquakes and their associated tsunamis had also been estimated based on the known geological record and numerical modelling... This point was highlighted by media soon after the 2011 event because such information had not been taken into account in the tsunami disaster prevention plan for the Pacific coast of Tohoku….

It is indeed true that geology is vital to gaining a better understanding of past tsunamis along any coastline and to interpreting the hydrodynamic features of paleotsunamis. However, the 2011 Tohoku-oki tsunami event tells us that there is still much to be learnt from tsunami deposits if we are to produce reliable tsunami risk assessments. Following the 2011 Tohoku-oki tsunami, we must return to the key question – why were the results of geological studies of the AD869 Jōgan event not incorporated into disaster prevention plans in Japan? Although most geological studies of the AD869 Jōgan tsunami had not been published in mainstream, peer-reviewed international journals, the results were nonetheless high quality and well disseminated. The AD869 Jōgan tsunami was indeed one of the best studied events in the world. However, Goto et al. (2012) candidly admit that tsunami geology is not a mature discipline and that prior to the 2011 earthquake it had not reached a sufficient level of recognition in Japan where researchers and disaster prevention experts from various fields were interacting effectively. Furthermore, in general terms, people continue to be unable to comprehend the significance and relevance of extreme events that occur on timescales spanning several 100s-1,000s of years that far exceed the human (or building) lifespan. This is where much of the challenge lies for tsunami scientists in education outreach to the general public.

The results that they report are fascinating, startling, and sobering – Geology Today provides a useful summary:

Future research following the 2011 Tohokuoki eathquake and tsunami

On 11 March 2011 a magnitude Mw 9.0 earthquake occurred off the Pacific coast of Tohoku District Japan, generating a major tsunami which caused widespread damage along the east coast of Japan and coastal areas around the whole Pacific basin. This event, referred to as the Tohoku-oki (oki means offshore in Japanese) generated a huge tsunami, with a run up height of up to 40 m, resulting in 15,868 dead and 2,848 missing, along with substantial damage, including that at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The damage and death-toll was despite the fact that the Pacific coast of Tohoku was one of the best prepared for a tsunami in the country. However, the event has also allowed researchers to look at the effects of this very well documented tsunami and to enable them to better interpret the historical sedimentary record to re-evaluate the magnitude of previous events. Such work is very important when developing tsunami disaster prevention plans.

Recently a special issue of the journal Sedimentary Geology has been devoted to the ‘2011 Tohoku-oki tsunami’. This special issue comprising 15 papers based on surveys and numerical modelling in Japan, along with one paper on the effects of the tsunami in the USA is prefaced by a review article by Kazuhisa Goto and colleagues looking at the sedimentological effects of the tsunami, future research arising from this event and also the social relevance of this research in the aftermath of the tsunami (Sedimentary Geology, 2012, v.282, pp.1–13).

The Pacific coast of Tohoku is divided into the Sanriku ria coast in the north and coastal plain areas such as Sendai in the south. The Sanriku coast is characterised by narrow drowned valleys, which have been damaged by tsunamis every few tens to hundreds of years [header image]. In contrast the Sendai plains are an alluvial lowland, with a beach, coastal dune ridges up to several metres high covered by pine forests, and low lying former wetlands and rice paddies. In this area there is no historical record of large tsunamis over the last thousand years, except for one possible event in 1611, although small tsunamis are recorded. These differences in the coastal geomorphology had marked effects on the tsunami wave. On the Sanriku coast, its steep and narrow valleys focussed the wave, generating the largest run ups, with a maximum rise of 40.4 m above sea level, although the inundation distance inland was relatively short, being generally up to 2 km. In contrast on the Sendai Plain, the tsunami travelled up to 5.4 km inland, but the wave height reached a maximum of only about 19 m. In the offshore area, about 1 km from the coastline, video footage has allowed a flow speed of 14 m/s to be calculated, although near Miyako sequential photographs taken from high ground suggest that the incoming wave velocity may have reached 32 m/s. In contrast, on land the flow speeds are variable as a result of the surface conditions, with estimates ranging between 3 and 8 m/s.

 Sediment deposits from the tsunami included deposits of sand and mud across the Sendai Plain, along with gravel deposits and locally extremely large boulder deposits. Image courtesy of Kazuhisa Goto 

Following the tsunami, rapid geological surveys were conducted to gain an understanding of the types of sedimentary deposits resulting from an event of this magnitude. On the Sendai Plain a sand layer extended some 3 km inland which continued as a mudstone layer almost to the maximum inundation limit of 5.4 km [image above]. This unit reached a maximum thickness of 30 cm and generally thinned inland. This bed was typically parallel laminated or structureless sands and silts with fragments of wood, glass and ripped up mud clasts overlying an erosional base. Based on an analysis of its heavy minerals, microfossils and isotope chemistry, it appears that most of the deposited sediment on the Sendai Plains was derived from beach, sand dune, lagoon and inland soils with only a minor contribution from offshore sediments. Importantly, it was recognized that a lot of the sediment resulted from liquefaction, with sand being vented from beneath the soils in the rice paddies. In contrast, on the Sanriku coast, the deposited sediment comprised both the eroded beach sands but also marine sediment from both the inner bay and even more pelagic areas.

In addition to the deposition of sands and muds, granule to boulder sized clasts were also observed. In some cases gravel deposits were up to 1 m thick and thinned landward. Boulder deposits were also observed, including large reworked fragments of concrete from the coastal defences, with the largest observed natural boulder being 6.5 × 2.5 × 2.4 m in size.

Offshore, within coastal bays and harbours there was evidence for both erosion, but also sediment deposition with the formation of large-scale submarine dunes. Further offshore at water depths between 300 and 5940 m the seafloor was covered by muddy sediments, in areas that prior to the earthquake had sandy or gravel surfaces. These sediments are interpreted as the deposits of turbidites, resulting from the tsunami backwash. Other turbidite deposits between 1 and 25 cm thick were observed in cores recovered offshore from the Sendai and Sanriku coastline, and caesium-134 and caesium-137 released from the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant was detected on the top of these deposits.

Such sedimentological studies as these are critical for us to correctly interpret the ancient record of past tsunami events, which in turn help us understand the scale and frequency of past events. This is indispensable in developing tsunami risk assessments, and the improvement of disaster prevention measures.

 

[I have to admit that I refrained from commenting that Kazuhisa Goto was the guy they should have gone to when planning tsunami defences, but it seemed – and probably still is – inappropriate. His 2012 article is online in English. The complete list of all the papers in the journal can be found at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00370738/282. The full articles are behind the pay wall, but I will be happy to supply a PDF for personal use if any reader would be interested.] 

 

George Steinmetz

This is a glorious, spectacular book.

Steinmetz's images from a paraglider provide a unique view of some of our planet's most beautiful landscapes, somehow a link between satellite views and "ground truth." I don't do commercials on this blog, but I can only recommend this - it's remarkably good value for the quality of the images and the stunning scope.

Sunday Sand: dunes, uniformitarianism, and recycling in Utah

 

There’s only one major sand dune field on the Colorado Plateau, and that can be found at the Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, way down in the southwest corner of Utah, not far from Zion National Park. And are these dunes really coral pink? Or reddish orange? Or orangey pink? Opinions vary – as do the colours of the sand depending on the light and the time of day. But their true colour hardly matters – they are impressive dunes.

Formed perhaps 10,000 years ago, as the northern ice was beginning to recede, their sands are home to a diversity of plants and animals, including the charming – but severely threatened – Coral Pink Sand Dunes tiger beetle, Cicindela albissima, only recently promoted to a species in its own right, and which is only found in these dunes.

The sand grains are typical of a windblown heritage, smoothed, frosted, and rounded by the endless mutual abrasion as they are buffeted by the wind. And they are all more or less of the same size – the finer grains are blown onwards, the coarser ones left behind; and they are essentially all quartz.

 

It’s the local winds that explain why these dunes are where they are. Just to the north-east of the dunes is a significant “notch” in the ranges of the plateau. The prevailing winds blast sand south-westwards, are funnelled through the notch, and, as they emerge and diminish, can no longer carry the sand, dropping it to feed the dunes. If you look at this on Google Earth, you can almost feel the sands streaming through the gap in the hills:

 

And why is that gap there? Well, because one of the great geo-architectural features of the Colorado Plateau, the Sevier Fault, cuts through it. The fault is a huge fracture in the earth’s crust, over a hundred kilometres long, and almost vertical; everything to the west of the fault has dropped down 700 meters (2300 feet) relative to the rocks on the east. The fault is clearly visible on the satellite image below, right, as a scar slicing across the landscape:

 

On the left is exactly the same area but shown as a geological map, the rocks of different ages appearing in different colours, the faults as black lines. To the east of the Sevier fault, the landscape is dominated by the light blue rocks of the Navajo Sandstone, to the west, the green of the Carmel Formation, mostly made up of limestones. The Navajo was deposited during the Lower Jurassic, around 185 million years ago, the Carmel later, on top of it, around 165 million years ago. So the map shows clearly that the movement on the Sevier fault is down to the west – the rocks of the Carmel are younger than the Navajo in the hills to the east, and have been completely removed by erosion on the uplifted side of the fault.

It’s a big and complex fault system, and the grinding of fault movement would have pulverised the rock along the fault zone, leaving it weaker and exposed to erosion – hence the gap through which the sands blow. And the Sevier fault is still on the move – it has been seismically active for a long time, part of the so-called intermontane seismic belt.

So, we have figured out why all those sand grains are piled up where they are, but what’s their story? The photo below shows the dunes in the foreground and, in background, the pink sandstones of the Navajo Sandstone on the east side of the fault. Look carefully and you will recognise dunes ancient and modern.

 

The Navajo is an iconic formation, the star of the landscapes of many of Utah’s national and state parks. It represents an enormous erg, a large sand sea that extended over most of Utah as well as parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming. Look carefully at the bluffs in the photo, and you can see gigantic scale cross-bedding, signalling wind-blown sand, dunes. Excavate the dunes of the Coral Pink Sand Dunes (in your imagination), and exactly the same structures will be revealed – the vital principle of uniformitarianism at work. That principle derives from the observations of James Hutton in the late 18th century, that the processes we see today sculpting the surface of our planet have always operated, and always will. Commonly summarised as “the present is the key to the past,” it has been debated and refined ever since – for example, the rates at which a process, e.g., global volcanism, operated have varied over time – but the principle is, indeed, the key to our being able to read the ledgers of earth’s history. Winds have always blown, sand has always been on the move, dunes have always been built in the same way.

The bluffs of ancient Navajo dunes in south-western Utah have been exposed to the attack of weathering and erosion for a long time, disintegrating and liberating the tough little sand grains. Those grains have been swept along by rivers, left in sand banks, dried out, and picked up by the wind for the next stage of their travels – to the Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. There they rest, for a while, on their never-ending journey, and what you see in those dunes today are re-cycled grains from a desert nearly two hundred million years ago.

 

[Heartfelt thanks to Myrna and Charles Gifford for collecting and sending the sand, and for the photographs.

Beetle image from the US Fish and Wildlife Service; geological map from the superb Utah Geological Survey interactive map site; for resources on the Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, see here, here, and here.]

Iconic Beach Resorts May Not Survive Sea Level Rises, Warns Ulster Coastal Scientist

This from a University of Ulster news release last month:

Some of the world’s best known beach resorts may not survive projected sea level rises, a leading coastal scientist at the University of Ulster has warned.

 Professor Andrew Cooper, Professor of Coastal Studies in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University, said a rise in sea level of even a few feet could threaten some of the world’s most iconic resorts like West Palm Beach in the US, Cancun in Mexico, Cannes in the south of France, Torremolinos in Spain and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

 And he also claimed the problems caused by changing sea levels are compounded by a lack of political will and a lack of short-term coastal management initiatives.

 Professor Cooper has investigated and reported on the world’s coasts in a research and teaching career that has taken him to more than 50 countries on six continents over the past quarter century.  

 He co-authored the book 'The World’s Beaches: a global guide to the science of the shoreline' last year.

 The Coleraine-based academic said that while the most pervasive driver of coastal change at present is global sea level rise, rising sea levels alone do not necessarily threaten beaches. The problem arises when beaches are artificially hemmed in and not given room to move.

 “Beaches have survived 120 m of sea level rise over the last ten thousand years. Problems only arise if we don’t give beaches room to move and to adjust to the changing sea level.” 

 Professor Cooper explained: “A key attractor in most of the world’s examples of coastal resort cities has been the presence of an adjacent beach. 

 "Some well-known examples are Benidorm, Torremolinos, (Spain), Cannes (France), West Palm Beach, Florida, Atlantic City, New Jersey (USA), Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (USA), Virginia Beach, Virginia (USA), Cancun (Mexico) and the most rapidly developed of all coastal resort cities, Dubai (United Arab Emirates). In all of these resorts the challenge is to preserve the real estate behind the beach and still save the beaches, which are being pushed landwards by rising sea level.  

 “All around the world, people are responding to the threat of rising sea level by building concrete walls to protect valuable beachfront property.  When sea level rises, the beach wants to move, generally further landward, but the wall stops it so eventually, the beach gets squeezed out. When the rising water reaches this protective wall, as it inevitably does, the beach is drowned.”

He continued: “Coastal defences built to protect valuable developments along shoreline are stopping beaches from moving landward which is where they want to go. That’s really the Achilles heel of coastal resorts as beaches must be allowed to ‘move’.” 

 Beach replenishment or nourishment is sometimes seen as panacea for disappearing beaches but, according to Professor Cooper, this is not a solution either.

 “There are a lot of issues with beach nourishment - not least the cost – but  beach nourishment would not be needed if developments were properly planned in the first place to give beaches room to move.  Maintaining resort beaches by nourishment is a major challenge with rising sea level." 

 Professor Cooper recently published the results of a study along Australia’s Gold Coast to assess adaption options for coastal resort cities. The study, believed to be the first of its kind to specifically assess adaptation options for coastal resorts, could become a blueprint for other resorts around the world.

 “On developed coasts, human activities dominate over natural processes in shaping the coastline. Beach resort cities are mostly artificial creations on the shoreline that rely on beach nourishment to sustain them and on their reputation for a clean and safe environment.  To maintain this during rapid sea level rise will be near impossible. To hold beaches stationary while sea level rise is pushing them landwards will require a massive increase in the amount of sand being pumped onto beaches.

 “Our study of resorts along the Gold Coast of Australia suggests that with advance planning, we might just cope with a 1metre sea level rise but not even careful planning beforehand could enable resorts to survive more than that. 

 “The problems are the volume of additional sand required to hold the beach in place and the engineering requirements for protection of low-lying developments and infrastructure.  These problems are compounded by a lack of political will to adapt, uncertainty regarding how much sea level will rise, short-term coastal management initiatives, and the climate change skeptics.”

[Photos: Soil Science, D. Lindbo.]

 

 

Sunday Sand: Blustery St. Bees

 

Blustery. A wonderful, quintessentially English adjective, for quintessentially English weather. “Blustery conditions will continue along the coast for the next few days.” Weeks? Months?

Well, it was November when we ventured to the Lake District at the kind invitation of the Cumberland Geological Society, and so we should hardly have been surprised by the weather – downpours in the hills, blustery on the coast. But blustery does make for drama – breaks in the fast-moving clouds, bursts of sun as well as rain. A walk along the beach, to use another quintessentially English term, “bracing.”

The goal was to have a look at the only cliffs of any significance between Wales and Scotland, the headland at St. Bees. The headland is underpinned by the St. Bees Sandstone, a gloriously red sequence of river sands and gravels, together with the occasional dune, recording the time 250 million years ago when Europe and North America no longer saw eye-to-eye and began rifting apart. The dynamics and vigour of these rivers is recorded in the swirling cross-bedding and intervening floods of pebbles in the cliffs.

The St. Bees Sandstones have been much prized for building, not only locally, but, as ballast in transatlantic ships, found their way into U.S. buildings – coals to Newcastle, really, since the iconic brownstones are of the same age and origin. And there’s another transatlantic connection – just up the coast from St. Bees is the old port of Whitehaven, scene of the U.S. invasion in 1778.

The sand grains of the St. Bees are fine-grained, angular and abrasive, their iron oxide coatings distinguishing them dramatically from the beach sands that reflect the rivers working away at the rocks of the Lake district and Southern Scotland. Where a small gully washed the local ingredients from the cliffs down on to the beach, the contrast was striking, a comparison amplified under the microscope:

One of the positives of arenophilia is that it provides destinations, often off the beaten track, small, oddball journeys through geography and history that would otherwise remain untaken. Our blustery afternoon stroll on the Cumbrian coast is a great example – and was further inspired by the wonderful contemplation of the St. Bees Sandstone by my writer/weaver friend, Ann Lingard, on her Solway Shore Stories website. And enjoy again her guest post from a couple of years ago.

 

Finally, a note: this will complete posting for 2012, and I wish my readers the very best for the holiday season and 2013. And, in the New Year, posting may well become more sporadic – I have another book to write, and am already on the verge of panic. However, we’ll see how things work out – this is my 400th post, and perhaps time to wander off in quest of a few laurels to rest on.

Weekend movies

 

If it’s cinematic entertainment you want, then I have a couple of recommendations: on the big screen, Skyfall (it delivers entertainment with style and gusto), in the privacy of your own home, Paint by Particle, a stunning epic directed and produced by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. This sweeping saga tells graphically the dramatic and compelling story of aerosols in our planet’s atmosphere – the image above is a detail, the one below a global extract.

 

The cast of characters is as follows: red dust, blue sea-salt, white sulphate, and green carbon. Prepare for the shocking moment when Karthala volcano on Grande Comore Island, off the southeast coast of Africa, erupts. Wonder at the onslaught of Saharan dust on the Atlantic. Cower in your seat as fires spew black and organic carbon across the globe.

Paint by Particle is a worthy sequel to Perpetual Ocean, NASA’s earlier production in which, with a stunning Van Gogh-like style (not an original observation), the “swirling flows of tens of thousands of ocean currents were captured.”

Watch and wonder – and feel intense gratitude to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the people who are clever enough to do these things.

 

[Phil Plait, on Bad Astonomy, has posted a slowed and annotated version of the aerosol video, and thanks, Walter, for pointing me to all this.]

The ongoing theme, ongoing

“We cannot sustain the shoreline in the future as we have in the past”

   

Oblique aerial photographs of Mantoloking, NJ. View looking west along the New Jersey shore. Storm waves and surge cut across the barrier island at Mantoloking, NJ, eroding a wide beach, destroying houses and roads, and depositing sand onto the island and into the back-bay. Construction crews with heavy machinery are seen clearing sand from roads and pushing sand seaward to build a wider beach and protective berm just days after the storm.

As the assessment of the devastation and reflection on the consequences continue in the aftermath of “super-storm” Sandy, a couple of provocative updates. The quotation above comes from a piece in the New York Times titled “Costs of shoring up coastal communities,” and are the words of S. Jeffress Williams, a coastal scientist with the United States Geological Survey and the University of Hawaii. The entire article – well-worth reading – begins:

For more than a century, for good or ill, New Jersey has led the nation in coastal development. Many of the barrier islands along its coast have long been lined by rock jetties, concrete sea walls or other protective armor. Most of its coastal communities have beaches only because engineers periodically replenish them with sand pumped from offshore.

Oblique aerial photographs of Seaside Heights, NJ. View looking west along the New Jersey shore. Storm waves and surge destroyed the dunes and boardwalk, and deposited the sand on the island, covering roads. The red arrow points to a building that was washed off of its foundation and moved about a block away from its original location.

And now the USGS has published its initial post-Sandy report, accompanied by spectacular – and sobering – before-and-after photos of the coastline. As has been previously discussed on this blog, barrier islands are arguably the most dynamic and shape-shifting coastal landforms; they are simply piles of sand that are constantly on the move, dramatically so during storms. Their typical migration is landwards, storms breaching the islands and hurling gargantuan volumes of sand from the ocean beaches and dunes (where there are any left) across the islands and into the lagoons and waterways behind them. The USGS photos sampled here need no further explanation – these are simply the most stupid places to build (and re-build) anything.

Oblique aerial photographs of Bridgehampton, New York. The view is looking northwest across the south shore of Long Island towards Mecox Bay. This location is a very narrow and periodically opens during large storms. Large volumes of material were transported into Mecox Bay when it breached during the storm. One week after the storm, the breach was being closed by mechanical means.

 

[Thanks to Steve Bossert for the NYT link, and Jim Jackson for the USGS report.]

An ongoing - and ignored - theme

 

When I say “ignored,” it’s not that I pretend that this humble blog has any influence whatsoever on the policies of governments, it simply reflects the fact that the considered and rational voices of scientists who know what they are talking about continue to be not only ignored, but even defied, by the powers that be, national and local. I have often mounted my soapbox about coastal management issues in the past, generally amid the chaotic aftermath of the latest hurricane (or, as the case may be, “superstorm”). A good starting point in the archives, should you be interested, would be “Our own little bridge to nowhere,” from March of this year; in there are various links to the views and advice of experts such as Rob Young and Orrin Pilkey.

So, in the aftermath of the unfortunately named Sandy, I can only reproduce – somewhat forlornly - a piece by Young and his colleague from USA Today a couple of days ago:

Sandy reminds us of coastal hazards

Rob Young and Andrew Coburn

Our governments encourage rebuilding in vulnerable areas -- at a large cost to taxpayers.

Story Highlights

• Hurricane Sandy represent a chance to reassess and improve future coastline exposure.
• A new study showed that New York and New Jersey among states most vulnerable to sea level rise.
• Blame our federal and state governments for encouraging rebuilding.

5:14PM EDT October 31. 2012 - Superstorm Sandy will almost certainly join the pantheon of "costliest storms in history." The impact of the storm has been felt from South Carolina to southern Massachusetts. There has been massive damage to significant segments of the New Jersey and New York coastline.

As hard as it may be to think about while people are still being plucked from rooftops, storms such as Sandy represent an opportunity to reassess and improve future exposure of coastline communities to storms and ocean surges.

For example, let's take the hardest hit coastal area from Sandy -- New Jersey and New York. A study released in March 2012 by Ben Strauss and Climate Central, which does research on climate change, listed New York and New Jersey among those states most vulnerable to sea level rise. These shorelines will only become more vulnerable with time, and more costly to maintain.

Even New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie agrees. When NBC's Brian Williams on Tuesday night asked Christie about the power of Mother Nature, and rebuilding the Jersey Shore, he said: "There is a way to do it, but we're going to have to sit down and be smart about it. ... One of the things I'm going to be talking with President (Obama) about ... is bringing the Army Corps in immediately to talk to us about how's the best way to rebuild the Jersey Shore."

Of course, predicting the likelihood of wind damage 50 miles from the coast is impossible, but we have a far better grasp today of the impact of coastal flooding and erosion. Every coastal community has its hazard hotspots, and yet we still have failed miserably in keeping development out of these highly vulnerable areas.

How can we keep repeating the same mistake? The federal and state governments provide multiple incentives for homeowners and businesses to rebuild, rather than relocate.

The continuing saga of Dauphin Island, Ala., is a notable example. The west end of island is arguably the most vulnerable shoreline in the United States. It has been impacted by tropical storms 10 times since Hurricane Frederic in 1979. Though it was spared Sandy's wrath, it is still recovering from damage from Hurricane Isaac in late August. The cost from the previous 10 storms to the federal taxpayer was approximately $80 million for an area of about one square mile with only 400 homes.

The funds for this rebuilding come largely through the public assistance sections of the 1988Stafford Act. This law created the federal system of emergency response that we are all so familiar with. When the president makes a federal disaster declaration for a county, aid dollars flow in with few strings attached. And, as with Dauphin Island, those dollars are often used to replace the same infrastructure over, and over again.

The Federal Flood Insurance Program, administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), provides vulnerable properties access to flood insurance that would not be available in private markets. Many states have government-managed "wind pools" to keep the rates for non-flood property insurance artificially low. The largest insurer of coastal property in Florida is the State of Florida through its Citizen's Property Insurance Corporation. Private losses not covered by insurance are often written off at tax time, an indirect federal subsidy of risky development.

Finally, federal and state taxpayers have spent billions of dollars over the last four decades pumping up beaches in front of coastal properties (beach nourishment) and constructing coastal protection projects. In New Jersey alone, approximately $1 billion in public funds have been spent just to keep beaches in front of homes and oceanfront buildings.

Even more mind-boggling is the fact that FEMA treats beach nourishment projects as infrastructure. If a storm washes away your beach, taxpayers will put it back. One of the hidden costs of Hurricane Sandy up and down the East Coast will be the federal funds used to put the sand back in front of the houses.

It really shouldn't be like this. Taxpayers should not be subsidizing the risk of irresponsible development, and we clearly shouldn't be rebuilding areas of known hazard multiple times. We need to allow market forces to set insurance rates and property values without the current government subsidy and risk underwriting.

Superstorm Sandy is a chance to change that calculus. Let's hope that federal, state, and local governments can come together to rebuild infrastructure in a way that will reduce future vulnerability, and limit taxpayer exposure.

Ultimately, let's hope that government at all levels can finally take the issue seriously. Every storm like Sandy is an opportunity to change the way we have been doing business. Let's take it.

Rob Young is director and Andrew Coburn is associate director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University.

So we’ll wait and see – perhaps after the next hurricane….

Meanwhile, there’s a good post at Geology in Motion on “Why did Sandy leave so much sand in Seaside Heights and even NYC?” and a useful explanation of what a storm surge is at Geology.com.

 

[Images courtesy of the BBC and AP]

Big History, Big Ideas

 

Long ago I became used to meeting someone new and having an exchange along the following lines:

And what do you do?

I’m a geologist

Oh, been on any interesting digs recently?

And, when it was determined that a geologist is not an archaeologist, I became used to the conversation, if it continued at all, changing direction. But it has always struck me as odd that we make these disciplinary distinctions – history, archaeology, geology – when, in reality, they are all looking at the sequence of past to present on our only home, Earth. In recent years there has been movement towards a satisfying blurring of the archaeology/geology divide, and a few instances can be found on this blog – understanding Mediterranean harbours and Roman construction for example. The same can be said of recognising the role of geology in history – see Snot’s Troglodytes and Wellington’s invasion of France; indeed, the examples from military history are endless, from Troy to the North African campaigns via Gettysburg.

But a properly joined-up story has still been difficult to find, despite the fact that every act of life’s drama – not least the extremely brief vignettes in which homo sapiens stars - has been staged amid the scenery and sound effects of geological processes. But in today’s paper, I read an article on the Big History project of David Christian, and decided to follow up a little. The initiative’s subtitle, “An Introduction to Everything,” sums up its ambition; it’s an heroic idea – to connect the last 13.7 billion years into one continuous story, into which astrophysics, geology, archaeology, and history are seamlessly merged. From the website:

Imagine exploring 13.7B years of history – from the Big Bang to modernity. Big history tells the complete story – with a goal of revealing common themes and patterns that help students better understand people, civilizations and our place in the  universe….

All too often, students learn facts and skills but don't have the chance to connect them all. Big history links different areas of knowledge into one unified story. It’s a framework for learning about anything and everything. This unified story provides students with a deeper awareness of our past, hopefully better preparing them to help shape the future of our fragile planet.

By giving students tools to incite exploration and connect knowledge, our aim is to help young people develop key critical thinking skills that can prove vital in any discipline they decide to follow in their academic/professional lives.

Christian is a historian, originally specialising in Russia, and I can’t help but be impressed by the fact that one of his many publications is a history of vodka. And, whatever one’s views on Bill Gates, it’s impressive that the entire initiative is receiving his ongoing – and undoubtedly crucial - support.

I will readily admit that this is the kind of initiative that I’m a sucker for, an educational program that links stuff together into a big story, and does so in a provocative way. I have only just begun poking around its many facets, but I would suggest listening to Christian’s TED talk and then exploring the project website (which, I must say, could benefit from a slightly more rigorous level of proofreading), together with its international association version. It’s not perfect, but then no project with this scale of aspiration and scope would ever be; but I’m impressed, and would be most interested in hearing comments and your views. It also strikes me that it’s an ideal program into which the Big Ideas of the Earth Science Literacy Initiative could be integrated. 

And, as a postscript, I have to mention that Walter Alvarez, the Berkeley geologist and (somewhat controversial) pioneer of the idea of the impact-caused demise of the dinosaurs, is one of the “founders” of Big History – he was already teaching a course with that title since 2006. If you go to his article on “A Geologial [sic] Perspective on Big History,” you will find the following:

To be more quantitative, if we ask how many individual people will be born into the next global generation, the answer is something like a billion, about 10⁹.  To give you a graphic idea of this number, a billion grains of fine sand is a double handful.  If we calculate how many different individuals might possibly be born in the next global generation, considering the number of women's eggs available, and the number of sperm that might fertilize them, the answer is around 10²⁴, and that number of grains of sand would fill the Grand Canyon!

 

 

Earth Science Week: the Big Ideas videos

 

Today marks the end of this year’s Earth Science Week. In the past, I have summarised and discussed the “Big Ideas” that have been put together by the Earth Science Literacy Initiative; these are excellent, fundamental, and of global relevance, so I will highlight them again. Furthermore, they are now supported by a series of award-winning videos, directly downloadable as WMV files, and available on YouTube, so here are the direct links:

VIDEOS (WITHIN YOUTUBE):

Why Earth Science?

Big Idea 1. Earth scientists use repeatable observations and testable ideas to understand and explain our planet.

Big Idea 2. Earth is 4.6 billion years old.

Big Idea 3. Earth is a complex system of interacting rock, water, air, and life.

Big Idea 4. Earth is continuously changing.

Big Idea 5. Earth is the water planet.

Big Idea 6. Life evolves on a dynamic Earth and continuously modifies Earth.

Big Idea 7. Humans depend on Earth for resources.

Big Idea 8. Natural hazards pose risks to humans.

Big Idea 9. Humans significantly alter the Earth.

You will notice that each of the videos shows the number of times it has been accessed – I’m not sure how accurate these numbers are, but they are depressing. It’s not that I would expect such videos to go viral, but, for example, “Earth continually changes” has been viewed only a thousand times in less than a year. The entire Earth Science Week and Literacy Initiative sites provide an extraordinary wealth of superbly prepared and accessible resources and materials, but I have to wonder if there aren’t innovative ways of broadcasting this value more widely.

Here’s an extract from this month’s Earth Science Week Update:

AGI now offers award-winning videos and other electronic resources to help students, educators, and others explore the “big ideas” of Earth science during Earth Science Week 2012 (October 14-20) and all year long. AGI’s Big Ideas videos recently won three prestigious awards: Digital Video (DV) Winner in Education, DV Winner in Nature/Wildlife, and Videographer Award of Excellence.

Big Ideas videos are brief video clips that bring to life the big ideas of Earth science - the nine core concepts that everyone should know. The Earth Science Literacy Initiative, funded by the National Science Foundation, has codified these underlying understandings of Earth science which form the basis of the Big Ideas videos.

View the Big Ideas videos on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/AGIeducation) or TeacherTube (http://teachertube.com/view_channel.php?user=AGIEducation). The Earth Science Week web site provides related resources. Educators can find dozens of classroom activities to help students build understanding of the “big ideas” online (http://www.earthsciweek.org/forteachers/bigideas/main.html).

Oh, and since yesterday – a fact perhaps not widely known - was Geologic Map Day, here’s my celebratory contribution. Courtesy of the wonderful Geoscience Portal via which the Australian Government links geoscience data for the entire country, it’s part of the geologic map around Alice Springs, scene of my travels earlier this year. For me, it’s not only an illustration of the beauty of a geologic map, but it reverberates with ancient and complex geological stories – and the amount of human effort, thinking, and ingenuity it took to tell them, exactly what Earth Science Week is designed to celebrate.