Jane Qiu, a grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, took to quake-stricken Nepal last month — venturing into landslide-riddled terrains and shadowing scientists studying what makes slopes more susceptible to failure after an earthquake. The journey proved to be more perilous than she had expected. What would it be like to lose all your family overnight? And how would you cope? It’s wit ...[Read More]
Counting the cost of natural disasters
Often, in the news, we are used to seeing disaster statistics reported as isolated figures, placed into context by the tragic human cost of floods, earthquakes and drought. The recent Ecuadorian earthquake that occurred on Saturday the 16th April, for example, was described as having an estimated economic cost of $820 million, which could rise as the scale of the disaster is revealed. But beyond t ...[Read More]
The day the Earth trembled: A first-hand account of the 25 April Nepal earthquake
On the 25th April 2015, Viktor Bruckman, a researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and a team of his colleagues were a few hours into a hike between the settlements of Lamabagar, in a remote area of northeastern Nepal, and the Lapchi Monastery when a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal. Their journey cut short by the trembling Earth, stranded in the heights of the Himalayas, this is thei ...[Read More]
GeoEd: A risky business
In this month’s GeoEd post, Sam Illingworth explores the pitfalls of being a scientist in the public eye. Following the recent acquittal of 6 geoscientists on manslaughter charges after ‘failing’ to predict the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, is it time we thought about improving how risk is communicated to the wider public? At the beginning of November of this year, six Italian scientists were acquitte ...[Read More]