Overview of Course

This course focuses on understanding the processes creating and triggering natural phenomena that we perceive as hazardous or disastrous. We will use multi-disciplinary data to study how these phenomena work, and use case studies from the countries that we will visit to better understand the scale and scope of these events. We will also look at how individuals, governments and multi-national consortiums deal with understanding, predicting, mitigating, and responding to the aftermath of hazardous events, and how economics, religion, infrastructure, education, and politics affects how these events impact people. Topics include plate tectonics, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, floods, coastal erosion, and tropical storms, with special emphasis on coastal regions and the areas that we will visit on our voyage.