Russell James Blong

Macquarie University · Department of Environment and Geography

Radiocarbon dates on charred plant remains are often used to define the chronology of archives such as lake cores and fluvial sequences. However, charcoal is often older than its depositional context because old-wood can be burnt and a range of transport and storage stages exist between the woodland and stream or lake bed (“inherited age”). In 1978...

Radiocarbon dates on multiple individual charcoal fragments floating together down the Macdonald River, New South Wales, Australia, have calibrated ages spanning >1700 years. Partial explanations of this range of inherited ages can be attributed to the inbuilt age of living biomass, charcoalisation conditions, hillslope transport and storage and/or...

Over the past 20 years, our understanding of volcanic eruption impacts on the built environment has transformed from being primarily observational with small datasets to one grounded in field investigations, laboratory experiments, and quantitative modeling, with an emphasis on stakeholder collaboration and co-creation. Here, we summarize key advan...

Global catastrophic risks (GCRs) affect a larger than hemispheric area and produce death tolls of many millions and/or economic losses greater than several trillion USD. Here I explore the biophysical, social-economic, demographic and cultural strands of four global catastrophic risks – sea level rise, a VEI 7 eruption, a pandemic, and a geomagneti...

Estimates of the age of the widespread Tibito Tephra and the VEI 6 eruption of Long Island, Papua New Guinea, have been based on genealogical records derived from oral histories of a ‘time of darkness’, the voyage of William Dampier who named Long Island in 1700 CE, radiocarbon, palaeomagnetic and ²¹⁰Pb dating, and efforts from around the world to...

In 1665 Athanasius Kircher included a short paragraph in his Mundus Subterraneus about a flamy spire and the collapse and disappearance of a high mountain following a ‘horrible earthquake’ on Timor in 1638. Although Timor has been known to have no volcanoes for at least the last one hundred years, Kircher’s story has been repeated for 350 years, ge...

While volcanologists are experienced in assessing present and past volcanism, and while archaeologists are experts in understanding past societies, the study of how ancient volcanic activity has impacted contemporaneous communities remains little systematised. We here present a fuzzy logic-based methodology for bringing together expert assessments...

We examined the radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) reservoir effect in Lake Kutubu using tephrochronology and terrestrial plant material to deliver a precise age-depth profile and sedimentation rates for this lake. Based on the presence of two tephra horizons (Tibito and Olgaboli), we found a reservoir age offset in sediments of between 1490 and 2280 ¹⁴ C yr usin...

With increasing population densities and expanding urban boundaries, the potential for explosive volcanic eruptions to have adverse impacts upon urban areas is on the rise. This is particularly true for volcanoes along subduction zones, because they are almost exclusively explosive and often coincident with large populations. Explosive eruption haz...

Tibito Tephra was first recorded in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 1971. By the late 1970s, the tephra had been mapped across tens of thousands of square kilometres, traced to its source on Long Island in the Bismarck Sea, and linked to pyroclastic density currents in the Matapun Beds on the island. With a tephra fall volume >10...

Sediment cores were retrieved from Lake Kutubu, the largest upland lake in Papua New Guinea, to assess palaeoenvironmental baselines. Two prominent tephra layers were encountered within the cores. Using a combination of core stratigraphy, sediment properties and geochemical characterization (electron microprobe and laser ablation inductively couple...

The preservation of thin (<300 mm thick) tephra falls was investigated at four sites in Papua New Guinea (PNG), Alaska and Washington, USA. Measurements of the variations in the thickness of: (i) Tibito Tephra 150 km downwind from the source, Long Island (PNG) erupted mid-seventeenth century; (ii) St Helens W tephra (erupted 1479–80 A.D.) on the sl...

Volcanic ash falls are one of the most widespread and frequent volcanic hazards, and are produced by all explosive volcanic eruptions. Ash falls are arguably the most disruptive volcanic hazard because of their ability to affect large areas and to impact a wide range of assets, even at relatively small thicknesses. From an insurance perspective, th...

William Dampier, one of England’s greatest navigators, named, described, and drew a profile of Long Island, Papua New Guinea in 1700. As this island produced a very large volcanic eruption with a disputed seventeenth- or eighteenth-century date, his observations assist in determining whether the eruption occurred before or after his visit. This con...

All explosive volcanic eruptions generate volcanic ash, fragments of rock that are produced when magma or vent material is explosively disintegrated. Volcanic ash is then convected upwards within the eruption column and carried downwind, falling out of suspension and potentially affecting communities across hundreds, or even thousands, of square ki...

Originally prepared for the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, this is the first comprehensive assessment of global volcanic hazards and risk, presenting the state of the art in our understanding of global volcanic activity. It examines our assessment and management capabilities, and considers the preparedness of the global scientif...

Volcanic ash is one of the farthest-reaching volcanic hazards and ash produced by large magnitude explosive eruptions has the potential to affect communities over thousands of kilometres. Quantifying the hazard from ash fall is problematic, in part because of data limitations that make eruption characteristics uncertain but also because, given an e...

In a companion paper (this volume), the authors propose a methodology for assessing ash fall hazard on a regional scale. In this study, the methodology is applied to the Asia-Pacific region, determining the hazard from 190 volcanoes to over one million square kilometre of urban area. Ash fall hazard is quantified for each square kilometre grid cell...

At least 225 people in the Fiji Islands died as a result of the 1931 hurricane and flood, representing the largest loss of life from a natural disaster in Fiji's recent history. This paper explores the causes of disaster and the potential for recurrence. The disaster occurred because a rare event surprised hundreds of people-especially recently set...

Following the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, the Minister of Civil Defence for New Zealand released the report "Review of Tsunami Hazard and Risk in New Zealand". The findings of this report surprised many - for a 500-year return period event, forecasts of property damage ranged from $12 to 21 billion. These values were multiples of most estimates of...

No Abstract Published V-IX 4.3. TTC - Scenari di pericolosità vulcanica JCR Journal

Correspondence from a long-established sugar mill provided the opportunity to construct the longest flood series for a river in Fiji—the Ba River in northwest Viti Levu—from 1892 to 2002. Flood waters reached the mill floor every four years on average. Contrary to common lore, this study could detect no increase in the frequency of major floods ove...

Hailstorms are by far the costliest insured natural hazard in Australia. Major metropolitan areas such as Sydney and Brisbane, located in mid-latitude coastal Eastern Australia, are especially vulnerable due to building exposure and geographical location. Results are presented using data from metropolitan Sydney and Brisbane for seven recent severe...

The Auckland Region, New Zealand is at significant risk from tephra falls originating both from the local Auckland Volcanic Field (AVF) and several distant, large-volume centres. We use geological data and observations of historical eruptions to develop a catalogue of simulated tephra dispersal patterns for the Auckland Region, using the ASHFALL mo...

VolcaNZ is a probabilistic volcanic loss model developed for the Auckland Region in New Zealand that currently considers tephra fall hazards from the Auckland Volcanic Field (AVF), Tuhua volcano, Okataina volcanic centre, Taupo volcano, Tongariro volcanic centre and Egmont volcano. In this first version of the model, structural and non-structural d...

In an analysis of the French episode of heat wave in 2003, this article highlights how heat wave dangers result from the intricate association of natural and social factors. Unusually high temperatures, as well as socioeconomic vulnerability, along with social attenuation of hazards, in a general context where the anthropogenic contribution to clim...

The first in-depth hail climatology for the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, based on reports of hailstones from 1791 to 2003, is described. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology's severe weather database is extended with a detailed compilation of scientific and newspaper accounts of hail fall for the greater Sydney area for the period 180...

Hailstorms occur frequently in metropolitan Sydney, in the eastern Australian State of New South Wales, which is especially vulnerable due to its building exposure and geographical location. Hailstorms challenge disaster response agencies and pose a great risk for insurance companies. This study focuses on the Sydney hailstorm of 14 April 1999 – Au...

In a companion paper, a methodology for ranking volcanic hazards and events in terms of risk was presented, and the likelihood and extent of potential hazards in the Auckland Region, New Zealand investigated. In this paper, the effects of each hazard are considered and the risk ranking completed. Values for effect are proportions of total loss and,...

Volcanic eruptions typically produce a number of hazards, and many regions are at risk from more than one volcano or volcanic field. So that detailed risk assessments can be carried out, it is necessary to rank potential volcanic hazards and events in terms of risk. As it is often difficult to make accurate predictions regarding the characteristics...

Risk decision-making in natural hazards encompasses a plethora of environmental, socio-economic and management-related factors, and benefits greatly from exploring possible patterns and relations among these multivariate factors. Artificial neural networks, capable of general pattern classifications, are potentially well suited for risk decision su...

The most important natural perils in Australia are tropical cyclones, earthquakes, bushfires, thunderstorms, floods, landslides and tsunamis. However, as far as residential buildings are concerned, the correct relative order of importance depends on the frames of reference used. Certainly, meteorological perils are more significant than geological...

Flooding in the business district of Kempsey, New South Wales, Australia, in 2001 allowed the collection and analysis of commercial flood damage data. Analysis indicated that direct losses were significant, totalling A$2.5 million. Data were variable owing to differences in the vulnerability of businesses to flood damage, differences in the impacts...

Catastrophe loss estimation for natural hazards combines both hazard and exposure data. While hazard attributes such as intensity distributions are usually represented at a spatially explicit raster (or pixel) level, exposure data such as population, dwellings and insurance portfolios are usually only available at spatially lumped census tracts. In...

This paper develops a GIS-based integrated approach to risk assessment in natural hazards, with reference to bushfires. The challenges for undertaking this approach have three components: data integration, risk assessment tasks, and risk decision-making. First, data integration in GIS is a fundamental step for subsequent risk assessment tasks and r...

A wide range of scales and indices are used to describe natural hazards and theirimpacts. Some scales infer damage levels from hazard characteristics while othersuse damage levels to estimate a physical characteristic. Damage scales may relyon raw dollar values, percent loss estimates, damage states, normalized values ormacrodamage categories. What...

A new damage index to estimate damage to buildings relies on construction costs per square metre, and a replacement ratio which approximates costs relative to the cost of replacing a median-sized family home. Building damage is estimated against a five-point scale with Central Damage Values at 0.02, 0.1, 0.4, 0.75 and 1.0 of the replacement cost.Da...

Damage information on 173 buildings was collected in the immediate aftermath of the September 1994 eruption which destroyed large sections of Rabaul town, Papua New Guinea. The extent of damage is presented on a five-point scale and related to construction characteristics and tephra load. Total roof loads in Rabaul town ranged from 2 to 16 kN m-2 (...

Understanding the spatial structure of fine spatial resolution images is instrumental for either pixel- or object-based image analysis. In this Letter, the characteristic scale of scene variation in images is evaluated using statistics of sub-images produced by a wavelet transform. Six statistics, namely mean, variance, standard deviation (SD), coe...

From a perspective of multidisciplinary studies, this paper introduces a framework for integrating remotely sensed images and areal census data for building new models across scales. The understanding of spatial scales of both data sources lays a foundation for scaling in attributes. Two specific tasks are reported in the paper. First, a range of s...

Natural hazards risk assessment requires data on the built environment. This paper reports an image analysis method that can extract building features, mainly roof plan areas, for potential vulnerability analysis. Both pixel- and object-based image processing methods are adopted. First, red/green/blue colour bands and image textures are incorporate...

Rationale Located in the remote Star Mountains of Western Province, Papua New Guinea, the Ok Tedi open-cut copper mine operates under conditions of particular topographical and geotechnical adversity. Slopes are frequently steep, rocks are highly fractured and weakened due to tectonics and weathering, and rainfall is world record-breaking, with ann...

During the past two decades there have been a wide range of applications for decision-making linking multicriteria evaluation (MCE) and geographic information systems (GIS). However, limited literature reports the development of MCE-GIS software, and the comparison of various MCE-GIS approaches. This paper introduces an MCE-GIS program called MCE-R...

Bushfire, as a major external ecological factor, diversifies bushland environments. Monitoring bushfire-prone landscape patterns and vegetation recovery after fires is critical for the long-term bushland management. Landscape ecology studies using remotely sensed imagery have been effective to identify the relationship between landscape patterns an...

Stress during volcanic crises is high, and any friction between scientists can distract seriously from both humanitarian and scientific effort. Friction can arise, for example, if team members do not share all of their data, if differences in scientific interpretation erupt into public controversy, or if one scientist begins work on a prime researc...

On 18 March 1990, an intense hailstorm in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia caused insured damage valued at A$million – the third most expensive loss event in Australian insurance history. While damage was widespread with claims for buildings spread across more than 130 postcodes, 20% of the claims came from just two postcodes. The proportion of d...

Earthquakes, tropical cyclones and floods are the most important natural perils in terms of human deaths on a global basis. In Australia, at least 4300 deaths in the last 200 years have been produced by heatwaves; about 2000–2200 each by tropical cyclones and floods; and bushfires and lightning strikes have each killed at least 650 people. On a glo...

Witori and Dakataua caldera volcanoes have been very active in the middle to late Holocene. Using tephrochronology, this paper establishes the chronostratigraphy of these eruptions and their magnitude, and the frequency of explosive volcanism at Witori and Dakataua. After a long dormancy, Witori started explosive activity at ca. 5600 conventional r...

This chapter reviews the physical characteristics of a wide range of volcanic hazards pertinent to assessments of vulnerability and risk with respect to humans, buildings, lifelines, and other infrastructure. When deaths related indirectly to eruptions are excluded, the record of fatalities from eruptions is dominated by a few catastrophic events t...

Information on fatalities from lightning strikes has been extracted from a specially compiled database on natural hazards in Australia. Records dating from 1803–1991 indicate that at least 650 persons have been killed by lightning strikes. Maps and charts show the percentages of victims with respect to age, sex, locality, activity, and other circum...

The Yakatabari mudslide complex, formed on overconsolidated mudrocks in Enga Province, Papua New Guinea, has a volume of about16 × 106 m3. Detailed examination during 17 years as part of a mining development indicates a variety of colluvium types with variable properties, but average peak shear strength values ofφ′p = 24.5° andcp′ = 11 kPa. Simple...

Archival and library search techniques have been used to establish extensive databases on deaths and damage resulting from natural hazards in the Solomon Islands. Although the records of fatalities are certainly incomplete, volcanic eruptions, tropical cyclones, landslides, tsunami and earthquakes appear to have been the most important. Only 22 per...

The importance of geological disasters ranks with with meteorological disasters on a global scale. Although available data are of limited quality it appears that geological disasters are far less frequent, kill twice as many people per event, produce more damage, but are less widely covered by insurance—suggesting that the victims are affected more...

Models to predict gully growth have concentrated on headward retreat. However, recent studies of gully erosion indicate that in many situations gully sidewalls are dominant sources of sediment. A classification scheme to group sidewalls according to the dominant processes has been developed and tested on a number of gullies in eastern Australia. Da...

The Wahgi Valley is a structural depression, between the Bismarck Fault Zone to the N and the Kubor Anticline to the S, which has been enlarged by erosional removal of N-dipping sedimentary rocks on the N flank of the Kubor Anticline. The geomorphic history of the area began when it became land about 35 Ma ago. The Wahgi Valley contains volcanic de...

There are far too many classifications of landslides - a simple method is presented. Environmental influences on landslide occurrence are described, together with assessment of risk and mapping of hazards. Site investigations are described including geomorphological mapping. -K.Clayton

Debris avalanches are rapid flowages of incoherent, unsorted mixtures of rock and soil material which move in response to gravity. On the southern and eastern slopes of Mt Hagen, a minimum area of 105 km2has been covered by chaotic deposits of matrix-supported clasts which form conical hills. The mean minimum thickness of the deposit is of the orde...

The Papua New Guinea Highlands experience a variety of natural hazards. This paper considers landslide, frost, volcanic, and epidemic hazards. It presents a number of case studies, including some dating from the pre-European contact period. An attempt is made to assess the relative significance of hazards in the area in terms of deaths per decade....

Geological hazards significantly affect communities in the tectonically active parts of the SW Pacific and SE Asian region. Geological hazards include intensive hazards, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and landslides, and slow-onset hazards, such as subsidence, coastal erosion, and coastal progradation. A regional data base should be esta...

Incluye bibliografía e índice

Planning for volcanic contingencies at the Rabaul caldera complex is a difficult task, requiring urgent attention in view of the results of volcano surveillance and historical eruption frequency. Historical eruption periodicities have ranged from about 2 to 59 years; the most recent eruptions were in 1937–1943 and caused more than 500 fatalities in...

Examines the nature of gully side wall erosion. Studies gully growth patterns and shows that side wall erosion is often dominant in the headwater portion of the gully system. Develops a model of side wall evolution which considers flume development. Active and semi active side walls may be dominated by rainsplash and slopewash processes. Erosion an...

This volume examines the diverse effects of volcanic eruptions on people and their activities using examples and case studies. Eight broad groups of volcanic hazards - lava flows, ash (tephra) falls, pyroclastic flows, lahars (mudflows), volcanogenic earthquakes, volcanogenic tsunami, atmospheric phenomena such as shock waves and lightening strikes...

SUMMARY Long Island, in the Madang Province of Papua New Guinea, forms part of the Bismarck Volcanic Arc. Most life on the island was apparently destroyed in a catastrophic eruption during the 17th or early 18th century, and the island has subsequently been recolonized by plants, animals and humans. The human population of the island is still small...

Little attention has been paid to the role of sidewall processes in gully development. Simple estimates of linear incision/sidewall erosion ratios at two localities in New South Wales, Australia suggest that sidewall erosion is responsible for more than half the gully volume. Studies at three localities where overland flow and throughflow are limit...

Erosion rates have been measured by repeated surveys over a 2. 5 yr. period. Total erosion expressed as a rate of surface lowering reached 4. 6-7. 2 cm yr** minus **1. Comparison with other measured erosion rates indicate that the rates recorded for Chim shale are amongst the highest measured anywhere in the world. The results could have been predi...

A moderately intense bushfire swept through much of the Hawkesbury Sandstone catchment of Deep Creek, Narrabeen Lagoon in Sydney's northern suburbs on 17 December 1979. Five days later, and before any rainfall, we installed three small runoff plots on a 12o north-facing slope below a sandstone bluff. This paper presents results from the first 12 mo...

A survey of the volcanological literature reveals that only limited generalisations concerning the effects of volcanic bomb impacts and tephra loads on buildings can be made. By using data from a variety of other sources, however, it is possible to define the impact energies required to penetrate or damage a variety of building materials. These dat...

The deposits may be divided into four units - a lowermost one composed mainly of airfall tephras, and three upper units dominated by ignimbrites. Each of the three upper units has a distinctive and consistent sequence of sub-units - a lower airfall lapilli deposit, a middle ignimbrite deposit, and an upper, finer-grained, airfall deposit. This sequ...