• World's Largest Outdoor Earthquake Simulator Undergoes Major Upgrade

    A major upgrade to the world’s largest outdoor earthquake simulator reached a milestone mid-April when the facility’s floor—all 300,000 lbs of it—was put back into place. When completed this fall, the simulator will have the ability to reproduce multi-dimensional earthquake motions with unprecedented accuracy to make structures and their residents safer during strong shakes.

  • Teaching Drones to Hear Screams from Catastrophe Victims

    In a disaster, time is of the essence when searching for potential victims who may be difficult to find. Unmanned aerial vehicles make the perfect platform for state-of-the-art technology allowing emergency crews to find those in need and provide situational awareness over a large area.

  • Analysis: The Texas Electric Grid and the Improvements that Didn’t Come

    After the deadly and expensive electrical outages during a winter freeze in February, Texas lawmakers passed major bills aiming to make such disasters less likely in the future. But there’s still a lot to do.

  • Increasing Pace, Intensity of Climate Hazards to Compound Security Threats: Report

    The other day the Expert Group of the International Military Council on Climate and Security (IMCCS) released its second annual World Climate and Security Report, which warns of the compound security threats posed by the convergence of climate change with other global risks, such as COVID-19.

  • Climate Change Increases Extreme Rainfall and the Chance of Floods

    Climate experts warn that, without urgent action, climate change will continue to cause an increase in the intensity of extreme rainfall that can lead to severe flooding.

  • A 20-Foot Sea Wall? Miami Faces the Hard Choices of Climate Change.

    In Miami, the U.S. metropolitan area that is perhaps most exposed to sea-level rise, the problem is not climate change denialism. Patricia Mazzei writes that “the trouble is that the magnitude of the interconnected obstacles the region faces can feel overwhelming, and none of the possible solutions are cheap, easy or pretty.”

  • Retreat from Rising Seas

    As climate change causes seas to rise, coastal communities around the world face a difficult dilemma: Should they fight to keep their homes and communities above water, or accept that moving inland may be the best option?

  • Increasing Flood Risks in the U.K.

    As climate change continues to cause unpredictable and extreme weather events around the world, researchers are calling for engineers to rethink how they design for flood prevention. Flood frequency analysis has been the cornerstone of flood risk control, hydraulic structure design, and water resource management, but the researchers say that flood series in most areas do not follow historical patterns.

  • Tipping Elements Can Destabilize Each Other, Leading to Climate Domino Effects

    Under global warming, tipping elements in the Earth system can destabilize each other and eventually lead to climate domino effects. The ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica are potential starting points for tipping cascades, a novel network analysis reveals.

  • How Coastal Towns Can Meet the Challenge of Sea Level Rise

    A group of Florida students was invited to participate in the community presentation of the “Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge,” a competition that tasked participating teams with reimaging how Nantucket, a small island off Cape Cod, could meet the challenges of climate change and sea level rise.

  • Why Hurricanes Devastate Some Places over and over Again – a Meteorologist Explains

    Every coastline in the North Atlantic is vulnerable to tropical storms, but some areas are more susceptible to hurricane destruction than others. To understand why as the region heads into what’s forecast to be another busy hurricane season, let’s look more closely at how tropical storms form and what turns them into destructive monsters.

  • Volcanic Eruption: How Long Would It Take to Evacuate Auckland?

    Scientists are working to understand how long it might take for people to move out of harm’s way ahead of a future eruption near Auckland, New Zealand. “The next eruption in the Auckland Volcanic Field could happen anywhere in the existing field, either on the land, or in the sea, so estimating how many people might be impacted carries a lot of uncertainty,” says one expert.

  • U.S. Doubles Funding to Prepare for Hurricane Damage  

    Ahead of what is forecast to be an above-normal hurricane season in the Atlantic Basin, the U.S. government is doubling funding to prepare communities for such storms or other extreme weather events. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting a 60% chance of an above-normal Atlantic storm season with six to 10 likely hurricanes. 

  • Previously Unrecognized Tsunami Hazard to Coastal Cities Identified

    A new study found overlooked tsunami hazards related to undersea, near-shore strike-slip faults, especially for coastal cities adjacent to faults that traverse inland bays. Several areas around the world may fall into this category, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Izmit Bay in Turkey and the Gulf of Aqaba in Egypt.

  • Another Active Atlantic Hurricane Season

    NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center is predicting another above-normal Atlantic hurricane season. Forecasters predict a 60% chance of an above-normal season, a 30% chance of a near-normal season, and a 10% chance of a below-normal season. However, experts do not anticipate the historic level of storm activity seen in 2020.