Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: futurism

Kids these days…

Millennials in America sometimes get a bad reputation, this time for good reason. A recent survey found that just 66 percent of young adults aged 18 to 24 years old have “always believed the world is round.”

YouGov polled 8,215 US adults on February 8th, 2018 to get a representative idea of America’s views on the shape of the Earth. What they found would make any scientist shake their heads, a surprising percentage of responders weren’t convinced the Earth is round.

The question asked individuals to categorize their thoughts surrounding the shape of the Earth into one of the five buckets below:

Read more

Geoscience researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Smith College and the Japanese Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology this week unveiled new, GPS-based methods for modeling earthquake-induced tsunamis for southeast Japan along the Nankai Trough. A Nankai-induced tsunami is likely to hit there in the next few decades, says lead author Hannah Baranes at UMass Amherst, and has the potential to displace four times the number of people affected by the massive Tohoku tsunami of 2011.

She and her doctoral advisor Jonathan Woodruff, with Smith College professor Jack Loveless and Mamoru Hyodo at the Japanese agency report details in the current Geophysical Research Letters. Baranes says, “We hope our work will open the door for applying similar techniques elsewhere in the world.”

As she explains, after the unexpectedly devastating 2011 quake and , Japan’s government called for hazard-assessment research to define the nation’s worst-case scenarios for earthquakes and tsunamis. Baranes notes, “The government guideline has focused attention on the Nankai Trough. It’s a fault offshore of southern Japan that is predicted to generate a magnitude 8 to 9 within the next few decades.”

Read more