Characteristics of geological hazards in South China coastal areas and impact on regional sustainable development
Prevention and treatment of geological hazards is important for the sustainable development of human society. Surface geological hazards alone caused direct economic losses of ¥3.47 billion, with 768 deaths and 785 injuries in Guangdong Province, South China, from 1994 to 2005. The major factors causing geological hazards can be categorised into three types: geo-environmental, climatic-meteorological and human activity. Accompanied by rapid economic development and population growth, human activities can cause geological hazards that are as serious as those caused by natural factors. The authors propose some suggestions for prevention and treatment of geological hazards to achieve sustainable development on the Chinese coast.
Comparison of analytical hierarchy process and certain factor models in landslide susceptibility mapping in Rwanda
The aim of this study was to compare the performance of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Certain Factor (CF) models in landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) in the western province of Rwanda. At first, landslide inventory map was prepared using 96 points localized by field surveying. Then, 65.63% (63 of 96 landslides) were randomly selected for building landslide susceptibility and the remaining 34.37% (33 of 96 landslides) were used to validate the models. Eight conditioning factors: elevation, slope angles, distance to roads, land use and land cover, rainfall, lithology, soil texture, and normalized difference vegetation index were analysed. The produced susceptibility maps were zoned into very low, low, moderate, high, and very high susceptibility. The validation of landslides susceptibility maps was accomplished by the area under the curve (AUC) method. The CF model generated high accuracy and prediction rates (74.62 and 74.012%) than that of AHP model (73.063 and 73.83%), respectively. The produced landslide susceptibility maps can help to recognize landslide hazard mitigation and adaptation needs.
Organic constituents in process water from the in-situ retorting of oil from oil-shale kerogen
Capillary-column gas-chromatography/mass-spectrometry (GC/MS) was performed on the acid, base, and neutral fractions o'f liquid- and particulate-phase methylene chloride extracts of a composite sample of raw process water collected from separator Tank 6 by the Laramie Energy Technology Center. Of. the 160 extractable and chromatographable organic comP.ounds tentatively :identified, the following compou~d classes were found· (listed in decreasing order of. abundance):