Natural Hazards Impacting Society
The resources within this section will foster the exploration of earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, mega-floods, and other extreme natural events that directly threaten communities, infrastructure, and the environment. Significant progress has been made in the investigation of such hazards through scientific ocean drilling, particularly in subduction zones. However, we remain largely uninformed about the subseafloor conditions that influence natural hazards in the marine environment. There are major knowledge gaps in understanding the mechanisms that control hazard recurrence, timing, and possible precursors, and how to assess their future likelihood. Scientific ocean drilling can help close knowledge gaps by installing subseafloor observatories to monitor in situ conditions before, during, and after hazardous events and by probing the stratigraphic record of prehistoric submarine and terrestrial hazardous events to understand processes and evaluate long-term magnitude-frequency correlations.
Key Words: earthquakes, erosion, floods, monsoons, natural hazards, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions