GEOL 106 Lecture Notes - Lecture 45: Preston Cloud, Coastal Erosion
26 May 2018
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CHAPTER 12 TEXTBOOK READING
- Tuvalu, South Pacific: island nation, east of Australia
o during storms and high tide → serious flooding, coastal erosion, reduced water quality
▪ partly due to rising sea level as a result of human-induced global climate change
o wave attacks that may eventually overtop the islets by rising sea level
- about 600 million people live at elevation within 10m from sea level
12.1 Global Change and Earth System Science: An Overview
- Preston Cloud (scientist who studied history of life on Earth, human impact, use of resources)
proposed 2 goals for Earth sciences:
1. understand how earth works and how it has evolved from landscape of barren rock to
complex landscape dominated by life
2. apply understanding to better manage our environment
- now recognized that effects of human activity on Earth are so extensive
- Earth system science: seeks to learn how various components of system (atmosphere, oceans, land,
biosphere) are linked on global scale and interact to affect life on Earth
o goal: predict future changes that are relevant to society and people today
o understand how entire Earth works as a system
12.2 Climate and Weather
- climate: characteristic atmospheric conditions of given region over long periods of times (years,
decades)
o average high and low temperatures, amount of rainfall at given location
o possible for two locales to have same average annual T but be in different climate zones
▪ e.g. San Diego has average annual T around 18 degrees and small T changes
month to month
• El Paso, Texas has close same average but experiences large changes in T
- weather: atmospheric conditions of given region for short periods of time (days, weeks)
CLIMATE ZONES
- simplest classification: by temperature and precipitation but climate at particular place or region may
be complex
o e.g. may depend on infrequent or extreme seasonal patterns like monsoon season in India
- major climatic zones:
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