Natural hazards articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Experimental forecasts show that a disturbed stratospheric polar vortex was not to blame for the deadly North American cold air outbreak in February 2021 - but it may have acted to sustain weather patterns and increase predictability in early 2021.

    • N. A. Davis
    • , J. H. Richter
    •  & E. LaJoie

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Earthquake breakdown energy is commonly interpreted as a proxy for fracture energy but is observed to scale with magnitude. Here the authors show that a scale-independent stress overshoot, as seen in the 3D dynamic earthquake rupture simulations, leads to comparable scaling despite constant fault fracture energy.

    • Chun-Yu Ke
    • , Gregory C. McLaskey
    •  & David S. Kammer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The pyroclast properties and features can provide insights into the dynamics of explosive eruptions of low viscosity magma. Here, the authors show how lava droplets, or pyroclasts are subject to melt removal and melt addition during transport in a gas jet and present a method to reconstruct eruption conditions from the pyroclast textures.

    • Thomas J. Jones
    • , James K. Russell
    •  & Lea Hollendonner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The viability of earthquake early warning (EEW) in Europe is highly dependent on the magnitude of the ongoing earthquake and the ground-shaking threshold for alert issuance. The potential effectiveness of EEW is highest for Turkey, Italy, and Greece.

    • Gemma Cremen
    • , Carmine Galasso
    •  & Elisa Zuccolo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tsunamis are devastating events. They are especially difficult to predict, when generated by landslides. In this paper, the authors overcome this issue by modelling the landslide and the tsunami in a unified framework in unprecedented detail.

    • Matthias Rauter
    • , Sylvain Viroulet
    •  & Finn Løvholt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This paper shows that faults comprised of heterogeneously distributed materials, as is typical for tectonic faults in nature, are weaker and more unstable than equivalent faults where the materials are homogeneously mixed together.

    • John D. Bedford
    • , Daniel R. Faulkner
    •  & Nadia Lapusta

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Building community resilience in the face of climate disasters is critical to achieving a sustainable future. Here, using the case study of community resilience during Hurricane Michael in 2018, the authors show that an overemphasis on recovery entrench ‘resilience traps’.

    • Benjamin Rachunok
    •  & Roshanak Nateghi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The hazards of pyroclastic surges remain poorly mitigated globally. Here, the authors show that their destructiveness is amplified by turbulent excursions of dynamic pressure energy that focusses inside the largest eddies and internal gravity waves.

    • Ermanno Brosch
    • , Gert Lube
    •  & Luke Fullard

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    New observations of volcanic and magmatic activity in Africa are changing our views of continental rifting and raising awareness of the associated hazards. However, despite a shift from crisis response to reducing disaster risks, limited capacity means mitigating geohazards remains challenging.

    • Juliet Biggs
    • , Atalay Ayele
    •  & Tim J. Wright

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The threat posed by erosive-landslides is directly linked to their mobility. Here, the authors propose a mechanical model for the energy budget of erosive-landslides that controls their enhanced or reduced mobility.

    • Shiva P. Pudasaini
    •  & Michael Krautblatter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sand spikes, sandstone bodies that have been enigmatic for nearly two centuries, represent a new type of seismite and a promising tool to identify strong impact-induced or tectonic paleo-earthquakes and their source regions in the geologic record.

    • Elmar Buchner
    • , Volker J. Sach
    •  & Martin Schmieder

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Thermodynamically, rainfall events are expected to become stronger in a warming climate. Here, the authors demonstrate the importance of dynamical aspects to the temperature-rainfall scaling by quantifying the influence of cyclonic activity that leads to negative scaling over large parts of the tropical oceans.

    • Dominik Traxl
    • , Niklas Boers
    •  & Bodo Bookhagen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Deep fluids inside volcanoes disrupt the oscillations of signals produced by wind and sea. Imaging this disruption through space and time allows tracking hazardous fluid migrations leading to earthquakes before they reach the surface.

    • S. Petrosino
    •  & L. De Siena

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nearly one-third of the global coastline is vegetated. Incorporating these vegetation belts in coastal protection strategies would result in more sustainable and financially-attractive designs to mitigate the impacts of extreme coastal storms.

    • Vincent T. M. van Zelst
    • , Jasper T. Dijkstra
    •  & Mindert B. de Vries

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Probabilistic tsunami forecasting (PTF) defines an approach to tsunami early warning based on uncertainty quantification, enhancing forecast accuracy and enabling rational decision making. PTF is here developed for near-source tsunami warning, and tested in hindcasting mode over a wide range of past earthquakes.

    • J. Selva
    • , S. Lorito
    •  & A. Amato

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The awareness of rock shape dependence in rockfall hazard assessment is growing, but experimental and field studies are scarce. This study presents a large data set of induced single block rockfall events quantifying the influence of rock shape and mass on its complex kinematic behaviour.

    • Andrin Caviezel
    • , Adrian Ringenbach
    •  & Perry Bartelt

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    A new generation of earthquake catalogs developed through supervised machine-learning illuminates earthquake activity with unprecedented detail. Application of unsupervised machine learning to analyze the more complete expression of seismicity in these catalogs may be the fastest route to improving earthquake forecasting.

    • Gregory C. Beroza
    • , Margarita Segou
    •  & S. Mostafa Mousavi

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Globalisation supports the clustering of critical infrastructure systems, sometimes in proximity to lower-magnitude (VEI 3–6) volcanic centres. In this emerging risk landscape, moderate volcanic eruptions might have cascading, catastrophic effects. Risk assessments ought to be considered in this light.

    • Lara Mani
    • , Asaf Tzachor
    •  & Paul Cole

  • Article
    | Open Access

    As sea levels rise, coasts are being increasingly  threatened by overtopping caused by the combination of sea level rise, storm surge and wave runup. Here the authors find that global coastal overtopping has increased by over 50% in the last two decades, and under a RCP 8.5 scenario this could increase up to 50 times by 2100 compared to today.

    • Rafael Almar
    • , Roshanka Ranasinghe
    •  & Elodie Kestenare

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Models of the viscosity evolution of mantle rocks are central to analyses of postseismic deformation but constraints on underlying physical processes are lacking. Here, the authors present measurements of microscale stress heterogeneity in olivine suggesting that long-range dislocation interactions contribute to viscosity evolution.

    • David Wallis
    • , Lars N. Hansen
    •  & Ricardo A. Lebensohn

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Open fires can increase heavy exposure to hazardous particulate matters, and thus harm human health, particularly among the vulnerable individuals, such as pregnant women. Here, the authors show an association between maternal exposure to fire smoke and increased risk of pregnancy loss in South Asia.

    • Tao Xue
    • , Guannan Geng
    •  & Tong Zhu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study investigates the relation between El Nino and landslide impacts. The authors show how El Nino and La Nina can cause swings in exposure of population to landslides that are as large as those due to rainy-season/dry-season variability in key locations, particularly South America.

    • Robert Emberson
    • , Dalia Kirschbaum
    •  & Thomas Stanley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Superfund sites have hazardous wastes that could affect the health of those who live near them, but this has not been assessed across the USA. Here the authors find that proximity to superfund sites decreases life expectancy and is further exacerbated by sociodemographic and climate change factors.

    • Amin Kiaghadi
    • , Hanadi S. Rifai
    •  & Clint N. Dawson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study shows how seismic and aseismic events are related in Mexico between 2017 and 2019. Based on a series of observations and models, the study suggests that the Mw 8.2 intraslab earthquake of 8 September 2017 severely altered the mechanical properties of the plate interface, facilitating the interaction between the events and disrupting the slow slip cycles at a regional scale.

    • V. M. Cruz-Atienza
    • , J. Tago
    •  & E. Kazachkina

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Large fissure eruptions can cause air pollution events when the volcanic plume returns to the same area after the initial advisory has been lifted. Here, the authors show that these events had a significant impact on health care usage in Iceland, and the impact was exacerbated when advisories were not issued successfully.

    • Hanne Krage Carlsen
    • , Evgenia Ilyinskaya
    •  & Thorolfur Gudnason

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fire activity in China and its associations with climate are not well quantified at a local scale. Here, the authors present a detailed fire occurrence dataset for China and find a dipole fire pattern between southwestern and southeastern China that is modulated by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

    • Keyan Fang
    • , Qichao Yao
    •  & Valerie Trouet

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Recently triggered seismic events such as the Pohang earthquake have exceeded predictions of average energy releases by a factor of 1000. A new framework is proposed to define maximum event magnitudes as a function of pre-existing critical stresses and fluid injection volume.

    • Ziyan Li
    • , Derek Elsworth
    •  & M. W. McClure

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Generally it is thought that ash aggregation leads to reduced atmospheric travel distances. Here, the authors show that the rafting effect can increase dispersal range by up to 3.7 times for particles between 300–500 μm, compared to sedimentation of individual clasts.

    • Eduardo Rossi
    • , Gholamhossein Bagheri
    •  & Costanza Bonadonna

  • Article
    | Open Access

    COVID-19 might occur together with other natural disasters but frameworks to quantify collective effects is lacking. Here, the authors investigated the readiness of a healthcare system in the face of wildfire during an epidemic by assuming the COVID-19 pandemic occurred around the same time with the Camp Fire case in Butte Country California 2018/2019.

    • Emad M. Hassan
    •  & Hussam N. Mahmoud

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    The unprecedented cost of the 2018 eruption in Hawai’i reflects an intersection of disparate physical and social phenomena: widely spaced, highly destructive eruptions, and atypically high population growth. These were linked and the former indirectly drove the latter with unavoidable consequences.

    • Bruce F. Houghton
    • , Wendy A. Cockshell
    •  & Eric Yamashita

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors here investigate the stiffness reduction of solid geomaterials during earthquakes via combining field, experimental and numerical data. The study shows multiple metastable contacts at small surface separations below a few diameters of a water molecule due to the oscillatory hydration interaction.

    • Su-Yang Wang
    • , Hai-Yang Zhuang
    •  & Yu Miao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors here present a multi-lake paleoseismological approach to evaluate the role of earthquakes in causing a spatio-temporal cluster of large, prehistoric rockslides between 3000 and 4200 years ago in the Eastern European Alps and for which the triggering mechanisms are still debated.

    • Patrick Oswald
    • , Michael Strasser
    •  & Jasper Moernaut

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors simulate bubble nucleation in silica-rich magma with conditions appropriate for Plinian eruptions. They demonstrate that the gap between decompression rate estimates from bubble number density and independent geospeedometers can be largely closed if nucleation is heterogenous facilitated by magnetite crystals and decompression rate is calculated as time-averaged values.

    • Sahand Hajimirza
    • , Helge M. Gonnermann
    •  & James E. Gardner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mechanisms that drive highly explosive eruptions of low-viscosity magmas, such as at Sunset Crater volcano, remain uncertain. Here, the authors present evidence for an exsolved CO2 phase ~15 km beneath Sunset Crater that was the critical driver of rapid magma ascent leading to the explosive eruption.

    • Chelsea M. Allison
    • , Kurt Roggensack
    •  & Amanda B. Clarke

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Whether disasters spur policy change remains contested. Here, the authors utilize a dataset of 10,976 natural hazard events and multiple disaster risk reduction (DRR) policy indicators across 85 countries over eight years to show that frequency and severity factors are unassociated with improved DRR policy.

    • Daniel Nohrstedt
    • , Maurizio Mazzoleni
    •  & Giuliano Di Baldassarre

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Compound climate events such as floods and droughts together can cause severe socio-economic impacts. Here, the authors analyse global hazard pairs from 1980–2014 and find global hotspots for the occurrence of compound events.

    • Nina N. Ridder
    • , Andy J. Pitman
    •  & Jakob Zscheischler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors show that seismogenic faults can be activated by stress perturbations by all possible modes of slip independently of the frictional properties. They demonstrate, that the nature of seismicity is mostly governed by the initial stress level along the faults.

    • François X. Passelègue
    • , Michelle Almakari
    •  & Marie Violay

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Exposure to extreme events is a major concern in coastal regions where human populations and stressed ecosystems are at risk to such phenomena. Here the authors show a marine heatwave on the continental shelf resulted from a novel set of compounding effects due to a tropical storm followed by an atmospheric heatwave.

    • B. Dzwonkowski
    • , J. Coogan
    •  & T. Lee

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