Geological Hazards

• Credit value: 15 credits at Level 6
• Convenors: Professor Gerald Roberts, Eleanor Jennings
• Prerequisites: good pass in Introduction to Geology and Structural Geology preferred, but will also be open to Birkbeck Geography, Environmental Science and UCL Environmental Geoscience students
• Assessment: a three-hour written examination (100%)

This module will convey an understanding of the origin and scale of natural geological hazards including earthquakes and landslips, volcanic hazards and floods. It will show how the risk associated with geological hazards can be reduced, and introduce the practical application and limitation of hazard monitoring and prediction.

Indicative module content

• 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.