Phillipines Catastrophes Aaron Flores

Aaron Flores Week 13 blog Coastal Hazards are physical phenomena that expose a coastal area to risk of property damage, loss of life and environmental degradation.   The Philippines coastal flood hazard is classified as high according to the information that is currently available.   According to the IPCC (2013), there is high confidence that extremes in sea level will increase in the Philippines with mean sea level rise yet there is low confidence in region-specific projections in storm surges.  This means that potentially-damaging waves are expected to flood the coast at least once in the next 10 years.  According to data by the World Meteorological Organization, the water levels around the Philippines are rising at a rate almost three times the global average due partly to the influence of the trade winds pushing ocean currents. On average, sea levels around the world rise 3.1 centimeters every ten years. Water levels in the Philippines are projected to ...

Aaron Flores Week 10 Blog Extreme weather includes unexpected, unusual, unpredictable severe or unseasonal weather.  Often, extreme events are based on a location's recorded weather history and defined as lying in the most unusual ten percent.  My country, the Philippines, placed 2nd among 178 countries that have suffered the most extreme weather events such as flooding and typhoons last year, according to the 2014 Global Climate Risk Index.  Extreme weather affected the Philippines and Pakistan the most, killing 530,000 people and causing losses of more than US$2.5 trillion.  This extreme hazard for weather in the Philippines is due to their plate tectonics as well as their dangerous location in the Pacific Ring of Fire. The Philippines needs to provide adequate financial and institutional support to help boost their disaster preparedness and resilience.  Because of these hazards, the Philippines is trying to limit th...

Aaron Flores Mass Waste Mass wasting, also known as slope movement or mass movement, is the geomorphic process by which soil, sand, regolith, and rock move downslope typically as a mass, largely under the force of gravity, but frequently affected by water and water content as in submarine environments and mudflows.  In the Philippines, there are many volcanoes and mountains. This meaning, there can be a lot of opportunities for avalanches. The Philippines is susceptible to landslides. Landslides include a wide range of movements in the ground such as a deep failure of slopes.  These mass wasting hazards are likely in the Philippines because of the extreme weather that the Philippines has. To prevent such hazards, the Philippines Local Government Unit (LGU) led by Mayor Rico C. Rentuza, has, since the 2006 landslide tragedy, made great strides to become an exemplary model LGU for disaster risk reduction and management. Included in this effort, the LGU today conduc...

Aaron Flores Philippine Volcanic Activity The Philippines is a place where volcanic activity is very prevalent.  Since the Philippines is located in the Pacific Ring of Fire,  where the oceanic Philippine plate and several smaller micro-plates are subducting along the Philippine Trench to the east, and the Luzon, Sulu and several other small Trenches to the west, there are many active volcanoes.   There are actually 53 active volcanoes in the  Philippines!  According to the Link,  The volcanoes of the Philippines rank as the most deadly and costly in the world: about 13% of its historic eruptions have caused fatalities, most notably at Taal and Mayon, and 22% of its eruptions caused significant damage.   With all of these volcanoes, the Phillips stresses to their citizens to always be ready to migrate or evacuate from their homes.  They also send out warnings to people as well as run preparedness drills where they evacuate famili...

Aaron Flores Blog 2  seismicity  Seismicity is the  the occurrence or frequency of earthquakes in a region.  The Philippines is located in the Ring of Fire in the Pacific Ocean which is a major area where a large number of earthquakes occur (About 90% of the world's earthquakes)   Thus, the chances of an earthquake happening in the Philippines is very likely, and the seismicity is very high.  Due to the poverty of the Philippines, not much can be done to prevent an earthquake catastrophe.  In 2013, The head of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council said, "In the Next Few years we will be prepared."  The Philippines is working on new ways due to technology to help forewarn the country and its citizens.  They are also working on better housing and land planning to help prevent disasters as well.  The Philippines is very prone to earthquakes because of its location, an...

Week 2 is about the different plate boundaries and how close our countries are to them . Plate tectonics are the reason why the several most devastating natural hazards occur.  The three different kind of boundaries are divergent, transform, and convergent.  Divergent is where the plates move away from each other, transform is when they move past each other, and convergent is when they move toward one another.  Earthquakes and volcanoes happen at divergent, earthquakes happen at transform, and subduction zones along with volcanoes, earthquakes, and landslides happen at convergent  boundaries.   The Philippine sea plate is unusual, because almost all the boundaries are convergent.  The Pacific plate is subducting beneath the Philippine Sea plate to the east while the northwestern part of the Philippine Sea plate is subducting beneath the Eurasian plate.  There are also transform boundaries near the Ta...