J. P. Terry and J. Goff: Natural hazards in the Asia–Pacific region

Abstract

This is an interesting and informative book that will help the outsider get rapidly up to speed with some of the issues linked to natural hazards in eastern Asia and the western Pacific and would be of general interest to those working on natural-hazard issues, as well as the marine geophysics and tectonics of the western Pacific area. The volume was put together by James Terry of the National University of Singapore and James Goff of the University of New South Wales. It is not a geophysical book in the limited sense of the term, but it spans several issues that are current ‘‘hot’’ research themes and demonstrates new data analytical methods that could be applied to a suite of related problems. This is a broad-based volume with 17 papers spanning a variety of geo-hazard issues in what the editors argue is a part of the world that is uniquely afflicted with such concerns because it spans the subduction tectonics of the Pacific ‘‘ring of fire’’ and Indonesia, the extrusion tectonics of SE Asia, as well as the climate of the Asian summer monsoon. Furthermore, the western Pacific is affected on an annual basis by typhoons that equal or surpass the hazards of the Atlantic hurricanes. All these hazards occur in a region that is both generally more densely populated, with wide areas close to the coast and less developed than the majority of the Atlantic basin, so that societies are less able to cope with the environmental stresses. The book includes both papers in which geophysical and geological data analysis takes center stage and others that consider how these data sets have been used to guide government policy and to shape plans for response to natural disaster. The disasters of the 2004 Indian Ocean ‘‘Boxing Day’’ tsunami and the 2011 Tohoku event in the Japanese offshore are ever present in the text and implications of the work, which is both right and logical. The book is relatively well balanced between the themes of typhoons, tsunamis, and the more solid-Earth threats of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, although a couple of the papers were a little too locally focused to be of wide interest. Most, however, manage to show how new methods of data analysis can be applied locally and help inform more regional problems. Anyone interested in seismic and volcanic hazards would be left shocked at the paper by Lagmay et al. (2012) describing the precarious location of the now deactivated Bataan Nuclear Power Plant in the Philippines perched on an active fault line and only a few kilometers from a dormant volcano with the potential for future eruptions, not much more than 50 km from the center of the capital city of Manila. Introducing traditional geoscientists to the meteorology of the region and the natural variability of typhoon activity is itself a valuable contribution that may enhance crossdisciplinary research. I was impressed by a paper by Switzer et al. (2012) concerning identification of tsunami deposits and how the sedimentary structures can be used both to understand the dynamics of tsunami wave activity and to act as a template for the identification of paleotsunami records, which Goff et al. (2012) note are of great rarity within the Asia–Pacific region, making the true appreciation of seismic hazard difficult to assess when government agencies and insurance companies are limited to the written historical record. Marine geophysicists will be especially drawn to the paper by Su et al. (2012) on the earthquake hazards of southwestern Taiwan, which is nicely illustrated with a series of cores, maps and seismic sections showing the structure of the shallow sub-seafloor in high resolution. P. Clift (&) Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA e-mail: pclift@lsu.edu