A failure at a fail-safe vault. The irony is delicious (like many of the seeds), but that's not the whole story. On its website, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is described by Crop Trust—the nonprofit that runs it—as “a fail-safe seed storage facility, built to stand the test of time—and the challenge of natural or man-made disasters.” It holds backups of seeds from seed banks around the world, with the goal of preserving a legacy of crop diversity in the face of changing climate, natural disasters, and human conflicts. It's operated for a little over nine years.
Rainfall can be wonderful, but only in moderation. Heavy, prolonged downpours can end in disaster, causing severe flooding, and even landslides. Unlike other natural disasters like hurricanes, volcanos and earthquakes, landslides weren't historically tracked or noted. But NASA is slowly changing that.
Compared to most natural disasters, a lava invasion does not move all that fast. Nowhere is that more evident than the small Hawaiian community of Pahoa, where a lava flow has been approaching the town since June 27. Now, the lava has finally arrived on the outskirts of town, overrunning private property. In the picture above, the lava behind the fence is chest-high. Geologists are keeping a close eye on the progress of the flow, which currently seems to be headed straight for Pahoa Village Road, one of the village's main streets, and beyond that, for Highway 130, a traffic artery travelled by 10,000 cars a day. It's already crossed over one road, Cemetery Road, and a cemetery (presumably the road's namesake).
Here at Popular Science, we love satellite images. They offer cool views of Earthly phenomena such as plankton bloomsand erupting volcanoes. They give important perspective on the impact of natural disasters such as floodsand fires. Seeing stuff from space can be abit disorienting, however. But fear not. The Earth Observatory, NASA's public site for its Earth sciences, has listed some cool patternsto look for while interpreting satellite images. Some highlights:
Few post-disaster myths have a stronger hold on our imaginations than the specter of a follow-on epidemic. Some imagine a killer virus will spread through the sudden glut of dead bodies. Others merely go by the notion that when it rains - or shakes, or erupts, or burns - it pours. But we can all take a deep, healthy breath: It's not true. There don't tend to be spontaneous epidemics in the wake of natural disasters. As a World Health Organization team explained in a 2007 study published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases: "The risk for outbreaks after natural disasters is low."
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