Geology rocks !

This week I will be focusing on Extreme Heat! Extreme heat is classified as a hazard of "medium" danger in Chile, according to ThinkHazard. The website includes, "there is more than a 25% chance that at least one period of prolonged exposure to extreme heat, resulting in heat stress, will occur in the next five years". Much of the extreme heat hazard is caused by the increase of global temperatures due to global warming and the country's placement on the equator, however according to the most recent assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2013, northern Chile's "temperature increase in the next fifty years will be slightly higher than the worldwide average". Example Just a couple years ago in 2016, a heat wave in Chile's capital of Santiago broke the record heat set 100 years prior. For the last century, the record had been 98.96 degrees Fahrenheit (set back in 1915), and had been broken by a 99 degree Fahr...

Hazards Chile's middle and southern regions are areas of high susceptibility to mass wasting, while the northern regions are classified with low to very low susceptibility, as you can see on this map from ThinkHazard. The reason for the concentration of landslide hazards in the central and southern regions is explained by Sergio Sepulveda, a student at the University of Chile. Sepulveda says, "In Chile, debris flows are usually triggered by heavy rainfall, although the amounts of precipitation required to initiate the flows are very variable according to the climatic regime".  Northern areas of Chile are classified as having an extremely dry climate (< 2 in of rain/yr), as it boasts the driest desert in the world, the Atacama. The central regions of Chile are classified as having a Mediterranean-like climate (12-40 in/yr), and the southern regions rainy-temperate (40-80 in/yr, sometimes reaching up to 157 inches in the southern coastal islands). Of course, ...