Hazard Roundup--January 2008

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Welcome and thanks for listening to the USGS CoreCast, I'm Scott Horvath. Today we're doing our Hazard Roundup for January 2008.

As we go ahead and shift over to earthquakes, we had one significant earthquakes, there's earthquakes that happen all the time, but one significant one...a 6.6 in the Queen Charlotte Islands region, which is off the main coast of British Columbia and that ocurred on January 5th.

As we switch over the landslides and wildfires, recent rains in January in southern California caused flooding and minor debris flows as well as evacuations in some of the areas burned in last falls wildfires.

As we move to volcanoes, the Mount St. Helens lava dome, inside the craters, continues to grow with low rates of seismicity. Over in Northern Mariana Islands, the Anatahon volcano sustained several long day episodes of elevated seismicity that ended around the 23rd of January. And now consists of repeated elevated seismicity lasting for hours before declining again. Yellowstone activity is still within background levels and readings show continued uplift of the caldera. Vulcanologists say the general uplift of the Yellowstone caldera is scientifically interesting and will continue to be monitored closely. If you want a report on the current conditions, the current uplift of the Yellowstone caldera, those can be found in our show notes for this podcast. So just go ahead and visit the site usgs.gov/corecast and take a look at the notes there.

As we switch over to hurricanes, no there isn't hurricane right now, thankfully, it's not hurricane season. But the USGS hosted a Congressional briefing on February 1st on how science can be used to prepare for and react to hurricanes based on a new report called "Science and the Storms: The USGS Response to the Hurricanes of 2005." This full color, 275 page report covers scientific studies performed after hurricanes Dennis, Katrina, Rita and Wilma and the images, and the satellite imagery in this publication are absolutely spectactular and the information itself is just a goldmine. So, I definitely recommend taking a look at this report. You can get the link to the report at the bottom of show notes for this particular podcast.

And that does it for this episode of the USGS CoreCast. Thanks for listening. Before you turn off this podcast though, I want you to go listen to our new podcast series called the USGS CoreFacts. You can go to it by going to usgs.gov/podcasts. The CoreFacts is a daily episode of science knowledge, really short one to two minutes maybe, at most, and what we like to say is CoreFacts is short on time, big on science. So go ahead and take a listen, go ahead and check it out.

Again thanks for listening. You can alwasy find the show notes for this episode at usgs.gov/corecast. And...keep it cool.

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Jessica Robertson:

CoreCast is a product of the U.S. Geological Survey, Department of the Interior.

Mentioned in this segment:

• Recent Ups and Downs of the Yellowstone Caldera
• "Science and the Storms: the USGS Response to the Hurricanes of 2005"
• USGS CoreFacts (the new USGS podcast series)

Music Credit:

"Battle at Norfolk", Edgen