Natural Hazards

With this book Dr. Bryant (from Wollongong University, Aus) gives a complete overview on natural hazards, as well as its social impacts. Apart from how natural hazards occur, the author also presents (controversial) methods how to predict hazards from occurring again (on short and long term). Bryant starts his book with his successful forecasts of the Australian summer 88/89. He was then able to predict the start of heavy precipitation in Australia NSW starting on Nov 15, 1988 and ending on June 30, 1989. He claims that there is sound scientific evidence that cosmic / planetary links exist with the occurrence of earthquakes and floods. The 11-year sunspot cycle and the 18.6-year lunar cycle (caused by the moon's orbit fluctuation) are used to show a correlation with the ENSO index, occurrences of floods and droughts in North America, Northern China, Australia, Patagonia, amongst others. Very surprising he also shows that in some parts of the world (such as the Mediterranean) the sunspot frequency and the seismic activity are correlated, via fluctuations in the Earth's rotation (in the order of milliseconds). However, if earthquake occurrence is dominated by some force external to the Earth (as mentioned by the author), then one would expect clustering to be taking place at the same time worldwide, which is not supported by the data. The book contains a lot of case studies with photographs, tables and figures of natural disasters. There is an abundance of references, which makes this book a very valuable work. The Dutch case study of coastal floods in 1953 is presented with a small mistake though. Not the dams fronting the old Zuiderzee were breached, but the dikes of the southern province of Zeeland were overtopped and slided because of extreme wind set up.