Authors / CoAuthors
Simpson, A. | Griffin, J. | Cummins, P. | Schneider, J.
Abstract
The Asia-Pacific region is home to well over half the world's population and is also the focus of some of earth's most intense geological activity. It is no surprise therefore that geological hazards, in particular earthquake and volcano hazards, make the Asia-Pacific region the scene of som e of the worlds most lethal natural disasters. While this is evident form a perusal of historical data relating to natural disasters, it is not clear how well such historical data can be used as a guide for high -impact events that might be expected in the future. This uncertainty is due to (1) how poorly extreme geological events having long recurrence intervals are represented in the relatively short historical record, and (2) the failure of the historical record to account for recent demographic trends, in particular the explosive growth of population in the Asia -Pacific region and its rapid urbanisation during the 20 th century. We present here two novel techniques for assessing the potential impacts of volcanic and earthquake events on human population in the Asia Pacific region. For volcanic risk, we have calculated the frequency of large eruptions, aggregated for the countries of the Asia -Pacific region, using data provided by the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program. These eruption frequ encies have been combined with an analysis of population data for the region to estimate the average number of people who might be affected, in the broad sense of death, injury or loss of essential services, by a major volcanic eruption. For earthquake, risk, we have considered that the potential future high -impact events will be driven by the probability that an earthquake might occur in or adjacent to one of the many megacities of the Asia -Pacific region. Earthquake probabilities near megacities are cal culated from catalogue data, and these are combined with a rough criterion for damage based on earthquake ground motion, to asses potentially affected populations. We present preliminary results of these analyses, which suggest the potential for earthquakes and volcanoes in the Asia-Pacific region to cause future `mega-disasters', for which affected populations may be much larger than the numbers indicated by the historical record.
Product Type
nonGeographicDataset
eCat Id
65588
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Cnr Jerrabomberra Ave and Hindmarsh Dr GPO Box 378
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Keywords
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- External Publication
- ( Theme )
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- earthquakes
- ( Theme )
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- volcanology
- ( Theme )
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- risk assessment
- Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC)
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- Earth Sciences
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- Published_Internal
Publication Date
2008-01-01T00:00:00
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geoscientificInformation
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[-90.0, 0.0, 90.0, -150.0]
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