Summer of disasters...

As always, over the summer holidays, geography continues to happen...

and as always, some of that is in the form of natural disasters...

There have been a bewildering range of news stories bringing tales of catastrophe:

• Chinese floods and landslides
• Heatwaves in Russia

The Pakistan flood situation seems to be getting worse by the day, with over 20 million people now apparently affected, and the risk of a wave of water-borne diseases spreading through the area.

The SASI group at Sheffield University have been busy as always re-presenting the area, to enable the true picture to emerge.

Their new map produces a view of Pakistan which has been adapted to show the areas where the population of Pakistan lives.

As one would expect, the flooding is going to be worse if it hits areas which are more densely populated.

Image produced by Ben Hennig and shared under Creative Commons license. For more details, check out Ben's webpages.

The PACIFIC DISASTER CENTER app (FREE installation for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad) allows the chance to see the latest news on a range of disasters...

Also a useful article on Alert Net, which explored the use of TWITTER in disasters, and the importance of syntax in tweets to help identify people who might potentially need help, or extract useful information from the stream of tweets.

One challenge for teachers in the first weeks of the new term is going to be to locate and place these events in the context of the natural "order of things", and also to identify some 'good news stories' to counter-balance these disastrous events...