Geological Hazards

• Credit value: 15 credits at Level 6
• Convenors: Professor Gerald Roberts, Eleanor Jennings
• Assessment: a three-hour written examination (100%)

In this module you will gain an understanding of the origin and scale of natural geological hazards including:

• earthquakes and landslips
• volcanic hazards
• floods.

We will consider how the risk associated with geological hazards can be reduced, and introduce the practical application and limitation of hazard monitoring and prediction.

Indicative syllabus

• Earthquake hazards including wave types, origin and location of earthquakes, magnitude scales, ground acceleration, effects of bedrock geology; long-term prediction, historical records, palaeoseismology, recurrence intervals, fault slip-rates, and fault behaviour models
• Short-term prediction and mitigation
• Landslides, classification and translation processes, monitoring and prediction
• Volcanic hazards, types of lava eruptions, scale of eruptions, ash fall eruptions, ash flow eruptions and lateral blasts
• Volcanic mudflows (lahars), their origin and effects
• Methods of monitoring and predicting volcanic eruptions, levels of volcanic hazard alert
• Mitigation of volcanic risks
• Tsunamis, their origin, recurrence and monitoring and warning times
• Occurrence in the geological record
• Floods in the geological record including exceptional high magnitude floods
• Discussion on the scale of recent and historic natural disasters

By the end of this module, you will have knowledge of earthquake, volcanic and tsunami hazards, and secondary hazards.