Hi. It's Paul Andersen and this is disciplinary core idea ESS3B. It's on natural
hazards. A natural hazard is a earth process that can eventually effective humans in a
negative way. And sometimes we confuse the term natural hazard, with the term natural
disaster. And so the one thing that you should remember is that a natural hazard may eventually
lead to a natural disaster. So let me teach you what that means using an example. In 1906
there was the great San Francisco fire. It was a fire that killed thousands of people.
It burned 80 percent of the city of San Francisco. And so that's clearly a natural disaster.
But what led to this fire? That was an earthquake. So there was a massive earthquake. We think
it was around a 7.8 on the Richter scale. And that eventually caused the fires which
led to the natural disaster. But earthquakes have been occurring in the San Francisco area
for probably millions of years. And will continue for millions of years into the future. And
we could have predicted that. If you look right here where San Francisco is, it's right
next to the San Andreas fault. And so these two plates are sliding past one another. And
so an earthquake is an example of a natural hazard. Another natural hazard that's also
caused by an earthquake is a tsunami, which is a massive wave that's created in the ocean.
Volcanoes are examples of natural hazards. And so is flooding. And so natural hazards
are going to occur naturally on our planet over and over and over again. And we can't
stop them from occurring. So you can not remove a natural hazard. There is another earthquake
in San Francisco. This was in 1989. It's sometimes referred to as the World's Series earthquake
because it interrupted game one of the World Series. And it caused damage like this. And
you can see it was centered a little bit farther south. But it was another massive earthquake.
And so since we can't remove the natural hazard, what we try to do is to reduce the amount
of damage that's caused by these natural hazards. And so you can see here that in that 1989
earthquake that some of the buildings were damaged. And those were ones that generally
had garages on the bottom. So they didn't have enough support. And so we can retro fit
buildings in areas that are prone to earthquakes. And we can make them safer. I happen to live
in an area, right next to Yellowstone Park, where we have a lot of earthquake activity.
And so the high school I teach in is retrofitted with these giant beams. And it's going to
keep us safer if and when we have an earthquake. And so another thing that is important is
that we try to predict these natural hazards. And so one that I can remember was the eruption
of Mount St. Helens. And so Mount St. Helens used to look like this. And then a few days
later it looked like that. So there was a massive eruption that blew the top off of
that mountain. But the scientists were able to predict that. There was a massive bulge
that was starting to form on the side of it. And it had literally moved up 50 feet. So
they knew that something was going to occur. And the people who died were people who didn't
heed their warnings. So we can predict a lot of things like volcanoes. We can make predictions
about hurricanes now. They don't just arrive. We can track them using satellite imagery
and radar. And we can figure out where they are and where they're moving and who's in
the path of that hurricane. Sometimes in the case of earthquakes we can't predict when
those natural hazards are going to occur. We don't know when the earth is going to slip.
But what we can do is we can gather data of when the earthquakes are occurring. Where
they're occurring. So we can predict these maps and figure out where our danger zones
are for earthquakes. And so along the coast of, the west coast we're obviously going to
have lots of earthquake activity. We'll get some right here in the middle. As the plate
is buckling. And then in areas where we have hot zones like here in Yellowstone Park, we're
going to have high earthquake activity. So it's an area where we should get ready because
earthquakes eventually are going to occur. And as the population on our planet increases,
we're going to see more natural disasters as a result of these hazards. We're going
to see increase in damage due to flooding, wildfires, hurricanes. Some of these maybe
increasing as we're seeing increases in the global temperature. We're going to see increase
in sever storms. And as we increase our population it's going to increase that damage double-fold.
And so how do we teach this in school? Well first of all you should talk about severe
weather. And so in the lower elementary grades you want to explain to your students that
severe weather doesn't just occur randomly. It occurs in specific times and in specific
places. And so in the southeast we're going to see hurricanes. And that's generally at
the end of summer and into fall. We're going to see tornadoes in the midwest. We're going
to see wildfires out west. We're going to see heat waves in the southwest and we're
going to see heavy snowfall in the northeast. And that's caused by lake effect. And so what
we find is that meteorologists can help us predict this severe weather and help us plan
for it. As you move into the upper elementary grades you want to start talking about natural
hazards. Listing them. Tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes. And make sure the students know
that they're not going to go anywhere. That we can not remove the natural hazard. But
what we can do is we can prepare for it. And we can reduce damage caused by it. As you
move into middle school you want to start talking about natural hazards and how they
can be predicted. So we can make direct predictions by either watching the earth, in the case
of a volcano. Or watching the storm in the case of a hurricane. And then we can do indirect
prediction. We can find areas where we're more likely to have earthquakes. And we can
use those to prepare. As they move into high school you want them to understand that natural
hazards are just a part of human history. That they've occurred through time. So this
is the eruption of Mount Vesuvius which covered all of the city of Pompeii. In 1906 we had
the San Francisco earthquake. We had Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And we'll continue to have
natural disasters that are caused by natural hazards into the future. We just have to prepare
for them and be able to predict them. And so natural hazards can occur at a local area,
regionally or can occur globally. They're not going anywhere. And they're going to increase
as populations increase. And some of those are going to increase as we make changes to
the global temperature. But as long as you know where they are, where they might occur,
we can prepare for them. We can limit damage. And I hope that was helpful.}