Monitoring Our Home Planet - Essay Example

Other short term potential impacts include disruption of transport and communication links, contaminated water supplies, destruction of built landscape; landslides may occur and fires damaging woodland areas. In the long term, earthquakes may result into diseases and displacement of people. There may be loss of human and natural landmarks. We can hence infer that earthquake leads to soil liquefaction, fires, avalanches and landslides, shaking and ground rapture, floods and even tsunami (Coen, 2012).

On the other hand, tsunamis have potential impacts on earth too, for example, tsunamis cause mass destruction to the environment and human settlements. Tsunami is also associated with long term effects such as damage and destruction, injury, death loss of millions in dollars, and psychological problems. Although the initial tsunami effects are usually publicized across the world via media, actual effects continue in the affected areas for many years after tsunami strikes (Hyndman & Hyndman, 2009).

Finally the volcanoes, this natural phenomenon is also associated with adverse potential impacts in affected areas. For example, volcanoes destroy buildings, houses, roads, and transport and communication links. Volcanic eruptions are also associated with both short-term and long-term hazards. . These natural phenomena, earthquake, tsunami, and volcanoes, are often monitored all over the world through the internet and people access information about occurrence of any of them via news media and social sites.

For example, volcanoes are monitored through a global inventory of active volcanoes, warning systems of volcanic activity, seismic and eruption information, and progressively forecasting of volcanic activity on longer timescales. Earthquakes are also monitored in a similar manner. Occurrence of earthquakes is recorded by seismometers to great distances; this is because seismic waves travel in the entire interior of the earth. During monitoring, the absolute magnitude of earthquake is reported conventionally by numbers on the scale of moment magnitude, also referred to as Richter scale.

A magnitude of 7 is reported and is known to cause serious damage over large regions. On the other hand, the felt magnitude is often monitored and reported using the modified Mercalli intensity scale and it reports intensities ranging between 2 to 7 (Bendick, 1980). Tsunami is monitored too; in the recent past, seismic activities that cause tsunami has been monitored under the sea and has made it possible to anticipate when tsunamis will occur. There has been warning system developed for reasons of monitoring the occurrence of tsunami recently.

Sensors have been put in the oceans in order to detect seismic activity. This monitors any increment in seismic activity which is the major cause of tsunami. The whole monitoring process is automated and can be about two minutes before seismic sensors detect any movement and relays a message via computers which activates an alert system (Wilkers, 1990). Ideally, these