EENS 204 Natural Disasters

Tulane University, Dept. Earth & Environmental Sciences

Natural Disasters

EENS 2040 & EENS 6050

Fall Semester 2011

Prof. Stephen A. Nelson
snelson@tulane.edu

	Course Description An examination of the causes, effects, and options available to mitigate natural disasters, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami, landslides, subsidence, flooding, severe weather, and meteorite impacts.
Follow the links below to material related to this course. New links will be added and updated throughout the semester, so check back with this page often.

Click on the Topic of Interest Below
Course Announcements	Syllabus 2040 Syllabus 6050	Disaster Summary Information
Lecture Notes	Homework Exercises	Web Links
	Field Trip Infomation

Announcements - Look here for announcements concerning this course

December 19 , 2011 - Final Exam scores and course grades have been posted on Blackboard (My Tulane). You should be able to access the Blackboard site for whichever section of the course you are enrolled in and see your score and grade from there. Llet me know if there are any problems with Blackboard Note that I have not yet posted grades for the 4081 and 6050 sections of the course. These will be posted later today or early tomorrow.

If you want to see your final exam or have any questions about your scores or grades, please feel free to come by my office, Room 208 Blessey Hall, or you can send e-mail.

Here are some general comments on the exam.:

Some general advice - when a professor explicitly tells you that certain questions are going to be on an exam, it is alway in your best interest to believe that professor and take actions so that you do not miss those questions when they actually do show up on the exam.

5 out of 69 (7.2%) of the class still think that the levee breaches that occurred in New Orleans during the Katrina event, all happened the day after Katrina made landfall. This is absolutley false. All levee breaches occurred on the same day that Katrina made landfall (August 29, 2005).
Only 5.9% of the class still think that magmas come from the liquid outer core of the Earth. THEY DO NOT!
Nearly 1/3 (32%) of the class needs to go back to kindergrarten and learn your alphabet. The last time I checked, the letter C was still the third letter in the alphabet. I'm also pretty sure that it was the third letter in the alphabet (not the fifth letter) when Hurricane Camille came ashore back in 1969.
More than half of the class (54%) think that the amount of damage that an earthquake causes depends on the time of day. The amount of casualties certainly does, but the damage will be the same no matter when the earthquake occurs.
Each increase in 1 in earthquake magnitude represents a 30 fold increase in energy released, NOT a 10 fold increase as many of you still think.
Although large earthquakes in China and floods in Bangladesh usually result in a large number of casualties, an impact with a large space object (> 1 km) would result in many more casualties and is thus the worst possible disaster we discussed in the course.
Although Carbon Dioxide gas is the greenhouse gas that is causing global warning, Water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
New Orleans does not have anywhere near a 40% chance of getting hit by a Category 5 hurricane in any given year.

Life or Death Questions

Several questions on the final exam were designed to see if you learned some valuable life or death lessons. I was quite disappointed that nearly 38% of you would likely have died (actually the percentage is likely lower because some you suffeed multiple deaths).

There were 4 deaths from tsunami, wherein people did something other than run up the hill when they saw the ocean retreat way off the coast.
8 deaths from the Category 4 Hurricane that resulted from people staying in their beach house when the storm came ashore.
4 Deaths that resulted from opening windows in the house during a hurricane under the false assumption that it would relieve pressure, but instead resulted in furniture crashing into heads.
11 deaths due to people getting struck by lighting by running out in an open field to protect themselves from lighning.

Hopefully those of you who pontentially died in these situations will read about your errors here before reality strikes.

Have a nice holiday break!

October 17 , 2011 - I have finished grading the midterm exam and will be returning the exam in class on Tuesday, 10/18. To see data and comments about the exam, click HERE.

September 1 , 2011 - I have placed a pdf version of the Powerpoint for the 1st lecture on Blackboard for each section of the course. You can find the downloadable file under Coarse Documents. I will continue to put these documents on Blackboard as I finish each lecture.

September 1 , 2011 - As I announced in class today , and contrary to what I said in our first meeting, Hurricane Irene can be counted toward one of the 12 disasters in your disaster summary if it ends up being one of the top 12 disasters of the semester.

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Lecture Notes

Note: Two versions of each set of lecture notes are shown in the table below. The first is in html format, optimized for viewing on the Web. You can print this version directly from your Web browser, but there is no guarantee that the pages will break where they are supposed to, since each person's browser can be set up differently (margins, fonts, font sizes, etc.).

The PDF (Portable Document Format) versions of the lecture notes are optimized for printing. All page breaks should occur correctly. If your web browser has the proper plug-in installed, clicking on the PDF will bring the file into your web browser from which you can then print the notes. If the plug-ins are not installed, your web browser will either attempt to download the PDF files or offer to send you to the Adobe web site to download the plug-ins for your browser. If you choose to download the PDF format lecture notes you will still need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view and print the files. This and further information about the browser plug-ins can be obtained by clicking on the icon below.

Special Note to Firefox v. 3.0 or later users - Firefox 3.0 and later uses a different method to display the Windows Symbol font which I used for creating Greek Characters like - D S a b etc. If these characatersdo not show up as Greek characters, your browser has this problem. The alternative is to use Internet Explorer to view the html files or to use the PDF files where all fonts are rendered correctly.

Note: Only Files with the Red Asterisk * have been updated for the Fall 2011 Semester