The Dynamics of Disaster

Earth’s treacherous energies are tracked in this informative, unexcitable primer on natural disasters. Geologist and MacArthur genius Kieffer, proprietor of the Geology in Motion blog, surveys a slew of spectacular cataclysms—the Tohoku earthquake, superstorm Sandy, tornadoes, volcanoes, floods, droughts, even a Martian landslide—and the scientific principles and mechanisms that generate them. She treats these varied upheavals within the unifying framework of analyzing “changes of state” that transform a seemingly placid landscape or seascape into deadly chaos: the sudden liquefaction of the ground by a quake’s tremor; the unnoticeably gentle ocean swell that piles up into a raging tsunami at the shore; the rock-face that shears off a mountainside in an eye-blink. Kieffer adroitly explains these phenomena with homespun analogies to exploding bicycle tires, ripples in a kitchen sink, and the like, and recalls her unruffled firsthand glimpses of the Mount St. Helens eruption and other disasters. There’s not a huge conceptual payoff to her grand unified theory of disasters; the particular details of how they go about devastating the world in their separate, idiosyncratic ways are more captivating than the common physical laws that underlie the mayhem. Kieffer’s measured tone doesn’t hard-sell the drama of geocatastrophe, but she presents a clear, engagingly wonky introduction to the field. 40 illus. and photos. (Oct.)