Stuart Nettleton, a senior lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, knows the significance of the problem he's examining—he calls it “the biggest problem that we face in the world going forward.” His challenge: to develop a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model that evaluates the effects of global warming on world economies over 150 years.

Last week, the world was shocked by the news of massive earthquakes and devastating tsunamis in Japan. The event is still unfolding and could become one of the most tragic natural disasters in recent history. Scientific understanding and modeling of complicated physical phenomena and engineering based on such analysis is imperative to prevent unnecessary loss of life from natural disasters. In this post, we'll explore the science behind earthquakes to better understand why they happen and how we prepare for them. Note: The dynamic examples in this post were built using Mathematica. Download the Computable Document Format (CDF) file provided to interact with the simulations and further explore the topics. First, let's start with locations. The following visualization is created from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) database of earthquakes that occurred between 1973 and early 2011 whose magnitudes were over 5. As you can clearly see, the epicenters are concentrated in narrow areas, usually on the boundaries of tectonic plates. In particular, there are severe seismic activities around the Pacific, namely the "Ring of Fire". Unfortunately, Japan is sitting right in the middle of this highly active area.