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UnitGrades 3 - 5

Natural Disasters: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Tornadoes & More

Six images: (left to right) Photo of a TX tornado's black funnel cone looking huge in a street scene with telephone poles, photo of homemade mini-marshmallow-toothpick structure wobbling on a bed of Jello-O, photo shows a Clarksville, MO, street intersection submerged in Mississippi River water, cutaway diagram shows underground layers and parts of a volcano, photo shows red lava spewing and flowing down a Kilauea, HI, slope, aerial photo shows hillside and road that slid down into a La Conchita, CA, neighborhood of houses.Natural hazards include tornados, earthquakes, floods, volcanoes and landslides.

All lessons provide a real-world engineering context, helping students understand what engineers study and create to help people live with natural hazards. Overview of topics by lesson:

  1. introduction to natural hazards and natural disasters
  2. the structure and dynamics of the Earth, its layers, tectonic plates, continental drift and faults
  3. earthquake measurement including seismographs, and structural considerations
  4. the Earth’s core and the causes, composition and types of volcanoes
  5. characteristics of and contributing factors to land and mud slides
  6. understanding tsunami formation and devastation to human-made structures
  7. various causes of flooding and the Earth’s water cycle
  8. the characteristics, damage and occurrence of tornados, and structure design to withstand high winds

Engineers learn about our planet so that humans can exist with and survive its powerful natural forces. Engineers must be aware of natural hazards in order to prevent or minimize their harmful effects on people and property. By creating improved techniques and materials, engineers make sure the structures we rely upon are built strong enough to reduce human injuries and casualties from the tremendous natural forces of wind, snow, water, fire and moving earth. While most natural hazards cannot be prevented, engineers do their best to create data gathering, monitoring, measuring, prediction and warning equipment, tools and models to protect human populations. Engineers use their science and math skills to build instruments and computer programs that can detect gases, changes in the shape of volcanoes, monitor underground movement, and estimate storm locations and severity. Data is collected by cameras, seismometers, GPS, pressure sensors, radar and satellites. Other helpful technologies include avalanche beacons and airbags, lightning rods, building shock absorbers and sliders, and warning sirens. Engineers work with scientists to determine locations at which dangers exist, how to minimize risks, and how to prevent the actions of people from creating catastrophes. Engineers also design test facilities to simulate and study hazard characteristics and model scenarios with computer simulations. Engineers also analyze and learn from past failures as a way to continue to improve structural designs, advance warning systems and emergency procedures for human safety. As engineers create devices that detect natural hazards, build structures to withstand them, and invent devices to study them, they use the process of gathering and analyzing data to better understand problems and formulate solutions.

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