Dear colleagues
I have been invited to edit a textbook on snow and ice hazards which will form part of a wider series of text books commissioned by Bill McGuire from UCL, with a series title of 'Geohazards in a Changing World' (an overview of the series is copied below). The series will be published by World Scientific (https://www.worldscientific.com/).
The book would be aimed at an undergraduate/early postgraduate audience and, rather than being a collection of individual research papers, I am looking to put together a useful and accessible textbook for students, covering a wide range of snow and ice hazards.
At this stage I am gathering expressions of interest from colleagues who may wish to contribute material on a particular topic. Each topic would comprise an individual chapter over which the author/s would have full ownership/authorship.
If this a project you would like to contribute to, do please drop me a line and/or alert any colleagues or students who you feel may be interested; this may, for example, be a useful opportunity for a recently graduated doctoral student to author work and 'gain' a publication relatively rapidly, without some of the more onerous aspects of journal publication.
The detailed contents of the volume have yet to be decided, as this will to some extent, depend on what colleagues may wish to contribute, but obvious candidates from a far-from-exhaustive list include: surging, GLOFs, permafrost thaw/mass movement-related hazards, snow and ice avalanches, lake ice shoves, links between ice loss and volcanicity/seismicity.
With thanks and best wishes, Phil Porter.
GEOHAZARDS IN A CHANGING WORLD
Planet Earth is in the throes of upheaval. The climate is heating fast and the environment suffering unprecedented degradation. At the same time rapid population growth and burgeoning urbanisation, feed the expansion of giant metropolises in some of the world's most hazardous regions. Concentrations of people, wealth and infrastructure exposed to geophysical hazards continues to follow inexorably upward trends, while the very nature of some hazards is changing. This series seeks to examine the causes and consequences of those hazards that are now coming to the fore, and which will increasingly come to define the 21st century. Leading the charge are heatwaves, wildfires, drought, glacier hazards, extreme rainfall and flooding, and more powerful and wetter tropical cyclones. Further down the line coastal erosion and inundation due to rising sea levels, iceberg flotillas released from their polar breeding grounds, and even methane outbursts from Arctic permafrost, all have the potential to make our hazardous planet even more treacherous.
Dr P R Porter
Associate Dean Education
Reader in Geoscience and Geoscience Education
School of Life and Medical Sciences
University of Hertfordshire
College Lane
Hatfield
Hertfordshire AL10 9AB
Tel: 01707 285091
