- You get a job with an insurance company that
offers a wide variety of coverage, from health to homes. Like
other insurance companies, they keep careful track of risks,
so they are interested to know that you know something about
environmental geology. Create "relative risk" maps for the
Northeast United States for each of the following: * earthquakes,
* land subsidence, * landslides, and * radon. Do this by taking
into account the main factors controlling each of these risks:
* earthquakes: plate boundaries and older faults * land subsidence:
areas with coal and limestone * landslides: intense rainfall,
rapid rainfall, steep slopes * radon: iron-magnesium-poor
volcanic rocks, granites, dark shales, some metamorphic rocks
Use your own scaling and mapping system to describe the amount
of risk.
- Your insurance company has many local clients.
Looking at geologic and topographic maps, do this same exercise
(1) for your local neighborhood.
- A publisher of a book on the best and worst
places to live in the Northeast hears about your maps. She'd
like a way to summarize the information for her purposes and
hires you as a consultant to provide one generalized map of
best and worst places with respect to geological hazards.
To do this you will have to take into account the relative
risk of the different kinds of hazards and combine them into
one scale of of risk. Using your maps from (1), find in the
Northeast a system to combine the different risks, so that
you have one number (say from 0 to 10) describing risk. Explain
your reasoning and the caveats involved in using just one
number to express risk. Draw another map, now using your 'combined'
risk scale. Make a list of the top 5 and worst 5 places in
the Northeast for natural geological hazards.
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