This book answers 1001 questions about all kinds of natural disasters: earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, avalanches, landslides, floods, droughts, fires, and animal plagues. A very informative, readable book. 18 photographs, 23 line drawings.

Answers 1001 questions about natural disasters: earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, avalanches, landslides, floods, droughts, fires, and animal plagues. A very informative, readable book. 18 photographs, 23 line drawings.

Through the centuries, the intricacies of fluid mechanics — the study of the laws of motion and fluids in motion — have occupied many of history's greatest minds. In this pioneering account, a distinguished aeronautical scientist presents a history of fluid mechanics focusing on the achievements of the pioneering scientists and thinkers whose inspirations and experiments lay behind the evolution of such disparate devices as irrigation lifts, ocean liners, windmills, fireworks and spacecraft. The author first presents the basics of fluid mechanics, then explores the advances made through the work of such gifted thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, da Vinci, Galileo, Pascal, Newton, Bernoulli, Euler, Lagrange, Ernst Mach and other scientists of the 20th century. Especially important for its illuminating comparison of the development of fluid mechanics in the former Soviet Union with that in the West, the book concludes with studies of transsonic compressibility and aerodynamics, supersonic fluid mechanics, hypersonic gas dynamics and the universal matter-energy continuity. Professor G. A. Tokaty has headed the prestigious Aeronautical Research Laboratory at the Zhukovsky Academy of Aeronautics in Moscow, and has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is Emeritus Professor of Aeronautics and Space Technology, The City University, London.

What size and shapes are raindrops? Where do they come from? What happens when sea and air meet? These and many other questions take readers into the realms of meteorology, oceanography, physics, chemistry, and volcanology. "Packed with interesting and significant information." ? Florida Scientist. 57 photographs and illustrations.

Takes the reader on a voyage of discovery as the author traces a single mass of air traveling from the Canadian Rockies to the northeastern United States.

Absorbing monograph by expert sets forth most of known properties of lightning: cloud and lightning charges, stepped leader, return stroke, dart leader, lightning on other planets, thunder, more. 144 illustrations.

This excellent text is a pioneering work in the study of landform development under processes associated with running water. Its primary emphasis is on subjects that were the focus of the authors' studies in both field and laboratory. Part I deals with the process of change in the evolving landscape. Part II explores process and form, and Part III, the effects of time. In Part I, the relation of geomorphology to field problems is analyzed in studies of a mountain block in a semiarid climate, a meandering river cut into bedrock, and benches along a sea coast. Part Two contains studies of weathering, climate, and such denudational processes as flooding and erosion. Here, too, are examinations of the drainage basin as a geomorphic unit, water and sediment in channels, channel form and process, and hillslope characteristics and processes. In Part III, the authors cover geochronology, drainage pattern evolution, channel changes with time, and the evolution of hillslopes. Two appendixes will help readers convert units and equivalents, and identify symbols and nomenclature. 1964 edition.

Natural Disasters as a Catalyst for Social Capital examines the vastly under-explored link between natural disasters and social capital in regards to the unprecedented June 2008 flood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In-depth qualitative interviews with flood victims and key informants in Cedar Rapids reveal that a resident’s perception of social capital after a natural disaster is shaped by their vulnerabilities and social mobility, which vary substantially and need to be understood contextually. This book, in highlighting the enormous impact of one disaster in a mid-sized Midwestern city, offers a framework for a new theory for why social capital shifts in societies from one generation to another: the transformative impact of shared traumas.

Complete and comprehensive, this text for advanced undergraduates in physics and engineering features exceptional clarity and minimum of mathematic notation. The expert and up-to-date treatment covers lightning phenomena and terminology, lightning photography, lightning spectroscopy, electrical and magnetic field measurements and current measurements, and more. Five appendixes. 140 figures and tables.

Excerpts from history and folklore trace the unusual beliefs and uses of gems since ancient times