Final Study Guide

I will be adding a few things as I update the final and incorporate insights from the group talks next week, so revisit this resource as the dreaded 12 December (2:45-4:45 p.m.) approaches. I have updated this to include questions from the talks (in red, toward the bottom of this guide.

Please review the following, referring to lectures, readings, labs, and group presentations (or an online search!). If it all "rings bells," you are in good shape for the final. It's a good idea to annotate this with where you found the relevant information for panicked reference during the final!

Which of the hazards we looked at this semester are the most and the least amenable to prediction, forecasting, and warning? Maybe arrange them in a sequence of predictability.

Earthquakes

• What causes most deaths during an earthquake?

• The three types of tectonic plate boundaries and the frequency and magnitude of earthquake hazard associated with them

• The two basic types of earthquake waves and the four main subtypes. All things being equal, which ones travel at which relative rates (consult epicenter lab)?

• Normal faults, reverse faults, thrust faults, and strike-slip/lateral faults

• Hanging walls and foot walls in faults

• What kinds of earth materials make earthquake waves slow down and compensate by greater amplitude?

• Using the nomogram

• Using a seismic trace diagram to identify when the primary waves of an earthquake arrived and when the secondary ones arrived

• The four main segments of the San Andreas Fault in California. Which have generated major earthquakes in the last 160 years or so (in 1906 and 1857)? Which segment hasn't ruptured during the period of written records (1769 - ) but which geological analysis suggests had a major quake around 1690?

• What is the biggest difference in the type of plate boundary zone in most of California versus in the Pacific Northwest (northernmost California, Oregon, Washington, southern British Columbia)? What are the associated risks for earthquakes of different magnitudes in these two regions?

• What is the natural period/natural frequency of a building and how might that affect its performance in an earthquake?

• Earthquake magnitude scales and intensity scales. What is the difference? Examples of each?

• Which measurement of earthquake strength eventually assigns only one number to a particular earthquake to represent the total energy released by that earthquake, and which other measurement can be used to show spatial variation in the amount of shaking a given quake produces across a region (isoseismal map lab)?

• Why has the Richter scale largely been replaced by the moment-magnitude scale (though it persists in the media)?

• What were the four worst earthquakes ever recorded by magnitude? One of these was the subject of a group report this semester. Could any of these be measured by the Richter system?

• Hypocenter (focus) and epicenter

• Plastic deformation in rock beds (anticlines and synclines), rock failure = faulting

• What is probably the worst kind of construction in the world in terms of earthquake resistance?

• Putting Down Roots in Earthquake Country

  • "drop, cover, hold" -- if you're indoors -- what about if you're outdoors?

  • Mess around with the MyHazards mapping function in the CalOES web site (readings, 9th week). Figure out which hazards lie under your own home. How about LA1-301?

Floods

• Disaster cascades/secondary effects common in floods

• How is the probability of a flood of a given magnitude related to recurrence interval?

• Riparian/riverine flooding (including flash floods), coastal flooding (tsunami and storm surge flooding), estuarine flooding

• Flooding due to dam failures (themselves due to poor locational assessment/construction standards, earthquakes, landslides, or stalled storms)

• Fire and ice: What is the connection between volcanism and flood hazard?

• Floodplain, alluvium, natural levées, meanders, thalweg, oxbow lakes, deltas and alluvial fans

• Watershed, catchment, drainage basin

• Why do streams change course?

• The physical geographic factors that drive variations in stream runoff

• Stream discharge

• Using simple linear regression to get a ball-park estimate of the 100 year flood

• Base flow, the rising limb and the recession limb of stormflow, bankfull stage, lag between peak precipitation and peak stormflow

• Flood hydrographs -- how they differ in arid versus humid environments and in natural versus built up landscapes

• How linear regression is used to estimate the discharge of 100 year, 500 year, and 1,000 year floods

• FIRMs

• Why the expression "100 year flood" can be misleading

• Why do people live on floodplains? Which types of people are most at risk to flood exposure?

• Structural and non-structural mitigations against flood hazard at the regional societal level and at the personal or household level

• Difference between flash flood watches and flash flood warnings in the American Southwest

• Physical basis of the "Turn Around, Don't Drown" campaign (NOAA/NWS) -- how deep does the water need to be to pick up a small car? a large truck?

Volcanoes

• active, dormant, extinct

• geography of volcanism as it compares with the geography of earthquakes

• intraplate volcanoes

• magma vs. lava (where are each found?)

• mafic vs. felsic

• explosive (high viscosity, high gas content, rhyolitic/dacitic: Vesuvian, Plinian, Péléan) vs. effusive (low viscosity, mafic:Hawai'ian or Icelandic) eruptions

• tephra (bombs, blocks, lapilli, ash, tuff, ignimbrite)

• volcanic landforms (cinder cones, shields, stratocones/composite cones, calderas, fissures/traps/flood basalts, lava tubes, fumaroles, submarine volcanoes, pillow basalts, tuyas, supervolcanoes)

• eruption precursors (earthquake swarms, harmonic tremors, gas changes in fumaroles, thermal anomalies in hot springs or lakes or fumaroles, rock demagnetization)

• volcano eruption prediction and juggling Type I vs. Type II errors

• causes of death in humans and other animals (lava flows, doming/collapse, avalanches, ashfall, poisoning, nuées ardentes, pyroclastic flows, lahars)

  What happened at Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1988?

• Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger

• how were many of the dead of Pompeii preserved?

• which modern city is most at risk to Vesuvius?

• rumor-mongering in Pliny the Younger's time -- and ours -- concerning Vesuvius

Group talks

• While the explosive growth of technology during our lifetimes has made daily life for most of us more convenient, it has also made us extremely vulnerable to random glitches in the underlying infrastructure and to intentional disruptions. How common is it for a company dependent on operational technology to experience cyberattacks of some sort? How many of these companies are transparent about the attacks? Why might some not be open about this?

• There is an intersectionality between cybersecurity and natural hazard. Which of the two case studies in the cybersecurity group paper represents that intersection? How?

• A framework for responding to cyberattack hazard is the "IPDRR" process. How does this compare and contrast with the "disaster cycle" visualization presented earlier in the course?

• What caused the Tohoku earthquake to be so extremely energetic (9.0 moment-magnitude!)?

• What was the chain of cascading events that led from the Tohoku earthquake to the nuclear meltdown in the Fukushima-Daiichi reactor?

• Which axes of personal identity led to worse earthquake vulnerability in the Tohoku earthquake?

• How does the Mt. St. Helens eruption of 1980 resemble the Tohoku earthquake of 2011? Think of the underlying geological context and its geography.

• How did the eruption unfold? That is, what is the unique series of geological events that produced the most deaths and socio-economic disruption?

• What was the social pattern of heightened vulnerability to the impending eruption?

• How do the great majority of wildfires start? Are they largely the result of natural events, such as lightning, or are the largely the result of human activities?

• What are the specific characteristics of power transmission systems that make them potent fire ignition sources? Under which circumstances especially?

• What are the four main aspects of personal identity that can make one especially susceptible to wildfire death and injury? One of these is oddly polarized: People at opposite ends of that spectrum are at heightened risk, though one end might be less vulnerable.
  

  Dr. Rodrigue's Home |   Geography Home |   EMER Home |   ES&P Home

  BeachBoard |   CSULB Home |   Library |   Bookstore

  

  Document maintained by Dr. Rodrigue
  Last revision: 12/01/23