Earthquakes And Animals: From Folk Legends To Science

Earthquakes And Animals: From Folk Legends To Science PDF Author: Motoji Ikeya
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814485101
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Those who survive major earthquakes often report the occurrence of mysterious phenomena beforehand — unusual animal and plant behavior, lightning, strange clouds and malfunctioning electrical appliances. In fact these stories are legendary the world over. But are they merely legends? Are the many people who report them just superstitious or suffering from over-active imaginations?Earthquakes and Animals brings objective science to bear on these old legends. But this is not the suspect science associated with recent attempts to validate UFO sightings. The book places in front of the reader the simple laboratory evidence for the behaviour of animals, plants and objects when they are subjected to intense electromagnetic pulses. In many cases they behave in ways that have been recorded for centuries — and are still reported today — as earthquake-related.Written for both the general public and scientists, Earthquakes and Animals demonstrates experimentally a physical basis for the old earthquake legends. It also adds tantalisingly to the science of earthquake prediction and cautiously suggests a legitimate new field of study — electromagnetic seismology.

Earthquakes And Animals: From Folk Legends To Science

Earthquakes And Animals: From Folk Legends To Science PDF Author: Motoji Ikeya
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814485101
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
Those who survive major earthquakes often report the occurrence of mysterious phenomena beforehand — unusual animal and plant behavior, lightning, strange clouds and malfunctioning electrical appliances. In fact these stories are legendary the world over. But are they merely legends? Are the many people who report them just superstitious or suffering from over-active imaginations?Earthquakes and Animals brings objective science to bear on these old legends. But this is not the suspect science associated with recent attempts to validate UFO sightings. The book places in front of the reader the simple laboratory evidence for the behaviour of animals, plants and objects when they are subjected to intense electromagnetic pulses. In many cases they behave in ways that have been recorded for centuries — and are still reported today — as earthquake-related.Written for both the general public and scientists, Earthquakes and Animals demonstrates experimentally a physical basis for the old earthquake legends. It also adds tantalisingly to the science of earthquake prediction and cautiously suggests a legitimate new field of study — electromagnetic seismology.

When the Earth Roars

When the Earth Roars PDF Author: Gregory Smits
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442220104
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Japan, which is among the most earthquake-prone regions in the world, has a long history of responding to seismic disasters. However, despite advances in earthquake-related safety technologies, the destructiveness of the magnitude 9 class earthquake and tsunami that struck the country on 3/11 raised profound questions about how societies can deal effectively with seismic hazards. This important book places the devastating earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown disaster in historical perspective, examining conceptions of earthquakes since the seventeenth century, the diverse ways actual earthquakes and their aftermath played out, and their enduring social and scientific significance. By looking backward, Gregory Smits identifies future pitfalls to avoid and assesses the allocation of resources for dealing with future earthquake and tsunami disasters. He criticizes Japan’s postwar quest for earthquake prediction and the concept of “characteristic” earthquakes. Smits argues that earthquakes are so chaotic as to be unpredictable, not only geologically but also in their social and cultural effects. Therefore, he contends, the best hope for future disaster mitigation is antiseismic engineering and flexible disaster-relief capabilities. As the first sustained historical analysis of destructive earthquakes and tsunamis, this book is an essential resource for anyone interested in Japan, natural disasters, seismology, and environmental history.

Fundamental Concepts of Earthquake Engineering

Fundamental Concepts of Earthquake Engineering PDF Author: Roberto Villaverde
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1439883114
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 976

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Book Description
While successfully preventing earthquakes may still be beyond the capacity of modern engineering, the ability to mitigate damages with strong structural designs and other mitigation measures are well within the purview of science. Fundamental Concepts of Earthquake Engineering presents the concepts, procedures, and code provisions that are currentl

The Man who Predicts Earthquakes

The Man who Predicts Earthquakes PDF Author: Cal Orey
Publisher: Sentient Publications
ISBN: 1591810361
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Meet Jim Berkland, a California geologist whose forecast of the famous October 17, 1989 World Series Quake that rumbled through the San Francisco Bay Area was right on the money. This is the first book to document a geologist's uncanny ability to foretell earthquakes around the world. This facinating read includes stories of earthquake survivors, a wealth of details about seismic activity in earthquake prone regions around the world.

Encyclopedia of Solid Earth Geophysics

Encyclopedia of Solid Earth Geophysics PDF Author: Harsh Gupta
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 904818701X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1579

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Book Description
The past few decades have witnessed the growth of the Earth Sciences in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the planet that we live on. This development addresses the challenging endeavor to enrich human lives with the bounties of Nature as well as to preserve the planet for the generations to come. Solid Earth Geophysics aspires to define and quantify the internal structure and processes of the Earth in terms of the principles of physics and forms the intrinsic framework, which other allied disciplines utilize for more specific investigations. The first edition of the Encyclopedia of Solid Earth Geophysics was published in 1989 by Van Nostrand Reinhold publishing company. More than two decades later, this new volume, edited by Prof. Harsh K. Gupta, represents a thoroughly revised and expanded reference work. It brings together more than 200 articles covering established and new concepts of Geophysics across the various sub-disciplines such as Gravity, Geodesy, Geomagnetism, Seismology, Seismics, Deep Earth Processes, Plate Tectonics, Thermal Domains, Computational Methods, etc. in a systematic and consistent format and standard. It is an authoritative and current reference source with extraordinary width of scope. It draws its unique strength from the expert contributions of editors and authors across the globe. It is designed to serve as a valuable and cherished source of information for current and future generations of professionals.

Environmental Hazards

Environmental Hazards PDF Author: Keith Smith
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351261622
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 715

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Book Description
The seventh edition of Environmental Hazards provides a much expanded and fully up-to-date overview of all the extreme environmental events that threaten people and what they value in the 21st century globally. It integrates cutting-edge materials to provide an interdisciplinary approach to environmental hazards and their management, illustrating how natural and human systems interact to place communities of all sizes, and at all stages of economic development, at risk. Part 1 defines basic concepts of hazard, risk, vulnerability and disaster and explores the evolution of hazards theory. Part 2 employs a consistent chapter structure to demonstrate how individual hazards occur, their impacts and how the risks can be assessed and managed. This extensively revised edition includes: Fresh perspectives on the reliability of disaster data, disaster risk reduction, risk and disaster perception and communication, and new technologies available to assist with environmental hazard management The addition of several new environmental hazards including landslide and avalanches, cryospheric hazards, karst and subsidence hazards, and hazards of the Anthropocene More boxed sections with a focus on both generic issues and the lessons to be learned from a carefully selected range of up-to-date extreme events An annotated list of key resources, including further reading and relevant websites, for all chapters More colour diagrams and photographs, and more than 1,000 references to some of the most significant and recent published material New exercises to assist teaching in the classroom, or self-learning This carefully structured and balanced textbook captures the complexity and dynamism of environmental hazards and is essential reading for students across many disciplines including geography, environmental science, environmental studies and natural resources.

The Signal and the Noise

The Signal and the Noise PDF Author: Nate Silver
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143125087
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
"One of the more momentous books of the decade." —The New York Times Book Review Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of the website FiveThirtyEight. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the “prediction paradox”: The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future. In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball to global pandemics, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good—or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary—and dangerous—science. Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise. With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver’s insights are an essential read.

Learning and Calamities

Learning and Calamities PDF Author: Heike Egner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134475888
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
It is widely assumed that humanity should be able to learn from calamities (e.g., emergencies, disasters, catastrophes) and that the affected individuals, groups, and enterprises, as well as the concerned (disaster-) management organizations and institutions for prevention and mitigation, will be able to be better prepared or more efficient next time. Furthermore, it is often assumed that the results of these learning processes are preserved as "knowledge" in the collective memory of a society, and that patterns of practices were adopted on this base. Within history, there is more evidence for the opposite: Analyzing past calamities reveals that there is hardly any learning and, if so, that it rarely lasts more than one or two generations. This book explores whether learning in the context of calamities happens at all, and if learning takes place, under which conditions it can be achieved and what would be required to ensure that learned cognitive and practical knowledge will endure on a societal level. The contributions of this book include various fields of scientific research: history, sociology, geography, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, development studies and political studies, as well as disaster research and disaster risk reduction research.

Seismic Japan

Seismic Japan PDF Author: Gregory Smits
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824839102
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
What are we to make of contemporary newspapers in Japan speculating about the possible connection between aquatic creatures and earthquakes? Of a city council deciding to issue evacuation advice based on observed animal behavior? Why, between 1977 and 1993, did Japan’s government spend taxpayer money to observe catfish in aquariums as part of its mandate to fund earthquake prediction research? All of these actions are direct legacies of the 1855 Ansei Edo earthquake, one of the major natural disasters of the period. In his investigation of the science, politics, and lore of seismic events in Japan, Gregory Smits examines this earthquake in a broad historical context. The Ansei Edo earthquake shook the shogun’s capital during a year of special religious significance and at a time of particularly vigorous seismic activity. It was also a turning point because, according to the prevailing understanding of earthquakes at the time, it should never have happened. Many Japanese, therefore, became receptive to new ideas about the causes of earthquakes as well as to the notion that by observing some phenomena—for example, the behavior of catfish—one might determine when an earthquake would strike. All subsequent major earthquakes in Japan resulted in claims, always made after the fact, that certain phenomena had been signs of the impending catastrophe. Indeed, earthquake prediction in Japan from 1855 to the present has largely consisted of amassing collections of alleged or possible precursor phenomena. In addition, the Ansei Edo earthquake served as a catalyst accelerating socio-political trends already underway. It revealed bakufu military weaknesses and enhanced the prestige of the imperial deity Amaterasu at the expense of the bakufu deity Kashima. Anyone interested in Japan, earthquakes, and natural disasters will benefit from Seismic Japan. The work also serves as essential background for understanding the peculiar history of earthquake prediction in modern and contemporary Japan.

Why Elephants Cry

Why Elephants Cry PDF Author: John T. Hancock
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000866645
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Why Elephants Cry is a fascinating frolic through the literature and evidence surrounding the use of unusual behavior of animals to measure and predict the environment. The role of animals, from the smallest ant to the biggest elephant, as predictors of environmental changes is framed around the climate crisis, which highlights the increasingly important part that animals will have to play in the future. Renowned biologist Professor John T. Hancock collects anecdotal stories and myths along with scientific evidence, demonstrating that observation of animals can be of tangible use. He looks at the measurement of the air temperature using ants, crickets and snakes, and goes on to assess the evidence that the observation of a wide range of animals can predict the weather or the imminent eruption of volcanoes and earthquakes. Evidence of animals being able to predict lunar and solar events, such as lunar cycles and the Northern Lights, is also considered. This is the only time that all this literature has been brought together in one place, a fascinating reference for anybody interested in animals and the environment. The book is also an ideal supplementary textbook for students studying animal behaviour.