Geohazards

Lecturing from someone else's lecture slides is a bit of a bore! But sometimes it has to be done. With Lynda ill and her Geohazard lectures having to be covered with little notice meant I had little choice. I already had to reformat her slides; she had put them online in PDF format, and someone had managed to put them back in PPT format, but with two slides per slide. So I had to manually split them again. A faff! And then figure out what was on them. And look up what they were about if I didn't initially. I couldn't spend to much time on that; I didn't want my own teaching to suffer.

The first lecture was rather theoretical; what is a geohazard? How do you study them? How have people dealt with them in the past (from an engineering, behavioural, development and complexity point of view, I'll have you know)? What's the difference between sustainability and complexity science? It was all rather social science-y for me. I did my best on it. It wasn't very inspired!

The next lecture is on a historical perspective; then I can talk about things such as the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, and the Tambora eruption, and the Aberfan slide, and whatnot! Much more to my liking. I lecture about volcanoes anyway as they are so important to climate. And earthquakes are related! And maybe Lynda will be back before I have to do the more specific lectures. We'll see!

 Mailboxes sticking out of a mudflow caused by the Mt St Helens eruption