Social dilemma follows 2018 eruption of Kilauea volcano
2021-02-25
(Press-News.org) The unprecedented cost of the 2018 Kilauea eruption in Hawai'i reflects the intersection of distinct physical and social phenomena: infrequent, highly destructive eruptions, and atypically high population growth, according to a new study published in Nature Communications and led by University of Hawai'i at Mānoa researchers.
It has long been recognized that areas in Puna, Hawai'i, are at high risk from lava flows. This ensured that land values were lower in Puna--which lies within the three highest risk lava hazard zones 1, 2 and 3--which actively promoted rapid population growth.
"Low prices on beautiful land and a scarcity of recent eruptions led to unavoidable consequences--more people and more development," said Bruce Houghton, the lead author of the study and Gordan Macdonald Professor of Volcanology in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST). "Ultimately this drastically increased the value of what was at risk in 2018, relative to earlier eruptions of Ki?lauea."
Kilauea is one of the most active volcanoes on Earth and has one of the earliest, most comprehensive volcanic monitoring systems. Its recent history has been dominated by activity at the summit caldera and from one of two lines of vents called the Eastern Rift Zone. Between 1967 and 2018, volcanic activity was dominated by eruptions from the upper part of the Eastern Rift Zone. In contrast, no damaging eruptions occurred after 1961 in the more heavily populated Puna district from the vents within the lower portion of the Eastern Rift Zone.
The UH team assessed trends in population growth in Pāhoa-Kalapana, Hilo and Puna using census data, and compared median cost of land and household income in these areas.
Valuable lessons regarding the complex interplay of science, policy, and public behavior emerged from the 2018 disaster.
"Steep population growth occurred during the absence of any locally sourced eruptions between 1961 and 2018, and set the scene for the unprecedented levels of infra-structural damage during the 2018 Lower Eastern Rift Zone eruption," said Wendy Cockshell, co-author on the paper and technical assistant at the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center (NDPTC) at UH Mānoa.
If population growth resumes in lava hazard zones 1 and 2, there will be increased risk in the most dangerous areas on this exceptionally active volcano translating into high cost of damage in future eruptions.
"Our funded research supports the principle of the initiatives by local and federal government to provide buy-out funding to land owners affected by the 2018 eruption to able them to relocate outside of these hazardous areas," said Houghton.
INFORMATION:
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-02-25
Our body consists of 100 trillion cells that communicate with each other, receive signals from the outside world and react to them. A central role in this communication network is attributed to receiver proteins, called receptors, which are anchored at the cell membrane. There, they receive and transmit signals to the inside of the cell, where a cell reaction is triggered.
In humans, G protein-coupled receptors (GPC receptors) represent the largest group of these receptor molecules, with around 700 different types. The research of the Frankfurt and Leipzig scientists focused on a GPC receptor that serves as a receptor for the ...
2021-02-25
Timothy Callaghan, PhD, and Alva Ferdinand, DrPH, JD, from the Southwest Rural Health Research Center at Texas A&M University School of Public Health, joined colleagues in the first national study of how often people in urban and rural areas in the United States follow COVID-19 guidelines. These include public health best practices like wearing masks in public, sanitizing homes and work areas, maintaining physical distancing, working from home and avoiding dining in restaurants or bars.
The research team used a survey of 5,009 U.S. adults that closely matched the makeup of the country's population as a whole. The survey asked how often participants followed COVID-19 prevention recommendations and collected data on political ideology, perceived risk ...
2021-02-25
ITHACA, N.Y. - A team from Cornell University's Environmental Systems Lab, led by recent graduate Allison Bernett, has put forth a new framework for injecting as much information as possible into the pre-design and early design phases of a project, potentially saving architects and design teams time and money down the road.
"(Our framework) allows designers to understand the full environmental impact of their building," said Bernett, corresponding author of "Sustainability Evaluation for Early Design (SEED) Framework for Energy Use, Embodied Carbon, Cost, and Daylighting Assessment" which published Jan. 10 in the Journal of ...
2021-02-25
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Doppler radar improves lives by peeking inside air masses to predict the weather. A Purdue University team is using similar technology to look inside living cells, introducing a method to detect pathogens and treat infections in ways that scientists never have before.
In a new study, the team used Doppler to sneak a peek inside cells and track their metabolic activity in real time, without having to wait for cultures to grow. Using this ability, the researchers can test microbes found in food, water, and other environments to see if they are pathogens, or help them identify the right medicine to treat antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
David Nolte, Purdue's Edward ...
2021-02-25
HOUSTON - (Feb. 25, 2021) - Low-income livestock farmers in developing countries are often faced with a difficult dilemma: protect their animals from endangered predators, or spare the threatened species at the expense of their livestock and livelihood.
A new paper by Rice University economist Ted Loch-Temzelides examines such circumstances faced by farmers in Pakistan. "Conservation, risk aversion, and livestock insurance: The case of the snow leopard" outlines a plan under which farmers can protect themselves from crippling financial losses while ...
2021-02-25
While the amazing regenerative power of the liver has been known since ancient times, the cells responsible for maintaining and replenishing the liver have remained a mystery. Now, research from the Children's Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI) has identified the cells responsible for liver maintenance and regeneration while also pinpointing where they reside in the liver.
These findings, reported today in Science, could help scientists answer important questions about liver maintenance, liver damage (such as from fatty liver or alcoholic liver disease), and liver cancer.
The liver performs vital functions, including chemical detoxification, blood protein production, bile excretion, and regulation of energy metabolism. Structurally, the liver ...
2021-02-25
Paleo-ecologists from The University of New Mexico and at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have demonstrated that the offspring of enormous carnivorous dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex may have fundamentally re-shaped their communities by out-competing smaller rival species.
The study, released this week in the journal Science, is the first to examine community-scale dinosaur diversity while treating juveniles as their own ecological entity.
"Dinosaur communities were like shopping malls on a Saturday afternoon ? jam-packed with teenagers" explained Kat Schroeder, a graduate student in the UNM Department of Biology who led the study. "They made up a significant portion of the individuals in a species and would have had a very real impact ...
2021-02-25
An international team of scientists has developed a system that can generate random numbers over a hundred times faster than current technologies, paving the way towards faster, cheaper, and more secure data encryption in today's digitally connected world.
The random generator system was jointly developed by researchers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), Yale University, and Trinity College Dublin, and made in NTU.
Random numbers are used for a variety of purposes, such as generating data encryption keys and one-time ...
2021-02-25
As Covid-19 impacts lives around the world- a new skeleton study is reconstructing ancient pandemics to assess human's evolutionary ability to fight off leprosy, tuberculosis and treponematoses with help from declining rates of transmission when the germs became widespread.
The researchers state the germs mutated to infect ancient humans so they could replicate- hopping across to as many new hosts as possible- but the severity of the diseases reduced as a result.
The analysis by Adjunct Professor in Archaeology Maciej Henneberg and Dr Teghan Lucas at Flinders ...
2021-02-25
In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium announced the first draft of the human genome reference sequence. The Human Genome Project, as it was called, had taken more than eleven years of work and involved more than 1000 scientists from 40 countries. This reference, however, did not represent a single individual but instead is a composite of humans that could not accurately capture the complexity of human genetic variation.
Building on this, scientists have carried out many sequencing projects over the last 20 years to identify and catalog genetic differences between an individual and the reference genome. Those differences usually ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Social dilemma follows 2018 eruption of Kilauea volcano
