Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
more than one thousand tornados were recorded on the territory of the USA, after
1990 this threshold was exceeded every year.
In general, natural disasters can arise from:
weather patterns (storms, cyclones, hurricanes,
fl
oods, tornadoes, thunderstorms),
other climatic conditions (droughts, bush
fires, avalanches, colds, winterstorms),
changes in the earth
'
s crust (volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunami, tidal waves).
floods, droughts, hurricanes, storms, tornados,
tsunami. Volcanic eruptions, landslides, landslips, mud
At present, natural disasters are
fl
fl
flows, snow avalanches,
earthquakes, forest
fires, dust storms, bitter frosts, heat, epidemics, locust invasions,
and many other natural phenomena. In the future, this list can be extended due to
appearance of new kinds of natural disasters, such as collisions with space bodies
and anthropogenic ones
—
bioterrorism, nuclear catastrophes, sharp change of the
Earth
invasion, etc. Therefore, it is important to
develop effective quantitative technologies and criteria, which would reliably warn
about possible dangerous catastrophic natural phenomenon.
Many experts associate the notion of a natural disaster with the notion of eco-
logical safety, which appeared in connection with the necessity to evaluate the
danger for human health on a given territory, constructions or possessions resulting
from the changing environmental parameters. These changes can be both natural
and anthropogenic. In the first case, the danger is caused by fluctuations in natural
processes connected with changes of the synoptic situation, epidemics, or due to a
natural disaster. In the second case, the danger occurs as a response of nature to
man
'
is magnetic
field, plague, robots
'
s activity. For instance, Gardner (2002), analyzing changes of the environment
in the Himalayas, on the territory of India, came to the conclusion that such factors
as deforestation and changes in vegetation cover, became the cause and intensi
'
er
of instability in this region characterized by a degradation of soil resources and
increase of the consequences of environmental destruction due to water
flows. Field
and Raupach (2004) as well as Abrahamson (1989) connected a change in the
pattern of the occurrence of natural disasters with the increase of instability of the
carbon-climate-man system. According to Field et al. (2002), this instability during
the nearest two decades can increase due to a change in many characteristics of the
World Ocean
fl
s ecosystems. Milne (2004), analyzing the history of various large-
scale disasters, has come to a pessimistic prognosis with respect to the fate of
humankind, using the notion of
'
.
In general, the ecological danger on a given territory results from a deviation of
the parameters of the man
“
Doomsday
”
s habitat beyond the limits, where after a long residence a
living organism starts changing but not in the direction corresponding to the natural
process of evolution. As a matter of fact, the notions of
'
“
ecological danger
”
or
“
”
are connected with the notions of stability, vitality, and integrity
of the biosphere and its elements. Moreover, the Nature-Society System (NSS) being
a self-organizing and self-structuring system and developing by the laws of evolu-
tion, creates within itself totalities of ecological niches whose degree of usability for
population of a given territory is determined, as a rule, by natural criteria (totality of
maximum permissible concentration, religious dogmas, national traditions, etc.).
ecological safety
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