1. Wildfire risk assessment using Geographic Information System (GIS) is an essential tool for tracking the increasing number of fires around the world. NASA has updated maps available daily on its Earth Observatory website. The terrible July 2012 wildfire in Colorado was first reported on June 23 in Pike National Forest. The TERRA satellite was able to track the movements of the fire from space. It is hard to track a fire from the ground because a fire moves wherever the wind pushes it. Even today the map is available at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov which shows the burn area of the fire. The type of photography is called Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER). The part of the land around the Waldo Canyon burn scar which still has plants and trees is shown in red. The burn area is black.
2. (a) Three mountainous areas that can be identified easily from the Flat Planet web site map are the Rocky Mountains that look like a ridge along the west coast of the United States, the Himalayas that look like a long curve north of eastern India, and the Andes Mountains that look like a ridge following the western coast of South America. The tectonic plates that are influencing the Rocky Mountains are located in the ocean along the U.S. mainland western coast. Together they are called the continental and oceanic transform fault. Two oceanic plates form a subduction zone all along the western coast of the South American continent. Peru is in a very dangerous place because to the south and north of the country where continental/oceanic faults occur. The continental and oceanic convergent boundary is located along the modern border of northern India.
2. (b) The west coast of the U.S. is more populated in terms of density than the other two mountainous areas. The Andes Mountains are the least populated. The northern part of India looks like it is populated right up to the edge of where the Himalayas start. I think that the western coast of the U.S. was settled because the land was rich there and the sea made trade easier. The Rocky Mountains were dangerous and hard to travel but people were also being pushed to find new places to settle because there were no jobs in the east and because they were hearing exciting stories of a better life.
3. (a) Continental crusts are formed from a layer called asthenosphere. This layer is made up of semifluid materials that have been identified as 40 to 80 miles below the oceanic and continental crust. The theory of how the layer works is that it is part of earth’s mantle which can flow both vertically and horizontally. That means that parts of the lithosphere can sink, rise up and move laterally; tectonic plates move laterally. In a nutshell that is how the Appalachian Mountains were formed when the east coast of North America broke away from the northwest coast of Africa which is called the breakup of Pangaea.
4.(a) The Pacific Northwest of the U.S. is reported to be at risk for an earthquake and tsunami similar to the recent event in Japan. The location of the plate tectonics make the area very dangerous. They are located in the ocean along the western coast an uninterrupted subduction zone is located. Branching out from the subduction zone to both the north and south is the continental and oceanic transform fault. Seismologists expect that the earthquake will be a “mirror image” of the Japan earthquake. In other words the tsunami will rush on to the land from the west to the east and the aftershocks of the earthquake will more westward. The name of the fault is the Cascadia fault line. The recent research suggests that there is a 37 percent chance of an earthquake occurring in the next fifty years. The predicted magnitude is 8.2 Richter or greater. The impact on communities there would be very bad. People can expect dire impacts. According to a geophysicist at the University of Nevada-Reno, John Anderson, the earthquake would be even worse than in Japan because the Cascadia faultline is located further inland. That means the rupture of the earth caused by the earthquake would also be further inland instead of along the ocean floor like in Japan. The magnitude of the 2011 quake in Japan was 9.0 and the waves of the tsunami were higher than 100 feet. So that is a measure of how damaging a quake at the Cascadia fault line could be in the future. (Johnson, 2012, MSNBC)
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Work Cited
Johnson, A. J. “Quake catastrophe like Japan’s could hit Pacific Northwest, new data show.” MSNBC. 8 March 2012. Web. 10 July 2012.
