Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards

About this book

Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards provides a valuable new insight into how climate change is able to influence, modulate and trigger geological and geomorphological phenomena, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and landslides; ultimately increasing the risk of natural hazards in a warmer world. Taken together, the chapters build a panorama of a field of research that ias only now becoming recognized as important in the context of the likely impacts and implications of anthropogenic climate change.

The observations, analyses and interpretations presented in Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards reinforce the idea that a changing climate does not simply involve the atmosphere and hydrosphere, but also elicits potentially hazardous responses from the solid Earth, or geosphere. Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards is targeted particularly at academics, graduate students and professionals with an interest in environmental change and natural hazards.

As such, the authors are hopeful that it will encourage further investigation of those mechanisms by which contemporary climate change may drive potentially hazardous geological and geomorphological activity, and of the future ramifications for society and economy.

Contents

List of Contributors
Foreword Bill McGuire and Mark Maslin

Chapter 1: Hazardous responses of the solid Earth to a changing climate / Bill McGuire
Chapter 2: Future climate changes in the context of geological and geomorphological hazards / Felicity Liggins, Richard Betts and Bill McGuire
Chapter 3: Climate change and collapsing volcanoes: evidence from Mount Etna, Sicily / Kim Deeming, Bill McGuire and Paul Harrop
Chapter 4: Melting ice and volcanic hazards in the twenty-first century / Hugh Tuffen
Chapter 5: Multiple effects of ice load changes and associated stress change on magmatic systems / Freysteinn Sigmundsson and others
Chapter 6: Response of faults to climate-driven changes in ice and water volumes at the surface of the Earth / Andrea Hampel, Ralf Hetzel and Georgios Maniatis
Chapter 7: Does the El-Nino–Southern Oscillation and influence earthquake activity in the eastern tropical Pacific? / Serge Guillas, Simon Day and Bill McGuire
Chapter 8: Submarine landslides and tsunamis in a changing climate / Dave Tappin
Chapter 9: Heat waves and slope stability in high mountain terrain / Christian Huggel and others
Chapter 10: Impacts of recent and future climate change on natural hazards in the European Alps / Jasper Knight, Margreth Keiler and Stephan Harrison
Chapter 11: Assessing the past and future stability of global gas hydrate reservoirs / Mark Maslin, Matthew Owen, Richard Betts, Simon Day, Tom Dunkley Jones and Andrew Ridgwell
Chapter 12: Methane hydrate instability: a view from the Palaeogene / Tom Dunkley Jones, Andrew Ridgwell, D. J. Lunt, Mark Maslin, D. N. Schmidt and Paul Valdez

Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Bill McGuire is Professor of Geophysicaland Climate Hazards at University College London. In 2005 he was a member of the UK Government's Natural Hazards Working Group, established in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami, and in 2010 was part of the Government Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, set up to address the ash problem associated with the Icelandic Eyjafjallajokull eruption. He is a contributing author of the 2012 IPCC report on climate change and extreme events.

Mark Maslin is Professor of Palaeoclimatology and Climate Change at University College London. He is a leading scientist with particular expertise in past and future global and regional climatic change and has published over 120 papers in journals such as Science, Nature, and Geology. He is a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Scholar and currently holds a Royal Society Industrial Fellowship.