“Many Florida homes can withstand category 5 hurricane winds, but not flooding. Babcock Ranch, a town near Fort Myers and Cape Coral, has stayed mostly unscathed during major storms like Hurricane Irma, Ian, Milton and Helene.
WSJ spoke with the town’s engineer to uncover the hurricane-proofing designs that help protect it.”
From Wall Street Journal.
The Guardian | Natural Disasters
“California is completely drought-free for the first time in a quarter of a century, a significant development in a state that endured grueling years with insufficient rainfall.
Over the last 25 years, drought conditions in California have intensified the state’s wildfire crisis and created challenges in its massive agricultural sector. But a few wet years, and a recent spate of winter storms, helped bring the state out of drought.
A map published by the US Drought Monitor on Thursday showed that no part of the state is experiencing drought or abnormal dryness. The development came after weeks of above-normal rainfall that helped fill reservoirs in the state, including lakes Shasta and Oroville, far beyond their historic averages. The December holiday season has been one of the wettest on record for parts of southern California.”
From The Guardian.
“In the predawn darkness, a team of scientists climbs the slope of Mexico’s Popocatépetl volcano, one of the world’s most active and whose eruption could affect millions of people. Its mission: figure out what is happening under the crater.
For five years, the group from Mexico’s National Autonomous University has climbed the volcano with kilos of equipment, risked data loss due to bad weather or a volcanic explosion and used artificial intelligence to analyze the seismic data. Now, the team has created the first three-dimensional image of the 17,883-foot (5,452-meter) volcano’s interior, which tells them where the magma accumulates and will help them better understand its activity, and, eventually, help authorities better react to eruptions.”
From ABC News.
“While the final death tolls are not yet available, reports suggest perhaps 1,600 people tragically lost their lives in these and several other events in the final two months of the year.
If those estimates prove accurate, that would make 2025 among the lowest in total deaths from extreme weather events. Ever! I am cautious here because the recent decade or so has seen many years with similarly low totals — notably 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2021.
What we can say with some greater confidence is that the death rate from extreme weather events is the lowest ever at less than 0.8 deaths per 100,000 people (with population data from the United Nations). Only 2018 and 2015 are close.
To put the death rate into perspective, consider that:
Since 2000, six years have occurred with <1.0 deaths per 100,000 people, all since 2014. From 1970 to 2025 the death rate dropped by two orders of magnitude. This is an incredible story of human ingenuity and progress.”
From The Honest Broker.
“Seismic listening posts are sparse on the vast, remote ocean floor. Their scarcity means researchers often can’t detect the first shakings of tsunami-causing earthquakes or the seismic waves that penetrate Earth’s deep interior like x-rays, carrying information that illuminates structures in the mantle and core. But the abyss is home to another kind of technology: the fiber-optic cables that shuttle internet data around the world.
In recent years, researchers have sought to use those cables to supplement ocean-bottom seismometers by watching for shifts in the light coursing through the fibers. Now, a team led by researchers at Nokia Bell Labs has advanced that technique to its ultimate realization, turning a 4400-kilometer telecom cable linking Hawaii to California into the equivalent of 44,000 seismic stations, spaced 100 meters apart.
The breakthrough, presented today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, has the potential to usher in a new age of imaging the planet’s interior and monitoring the sea floor and the ocean above it.”
From Science.
