Bill McGuire

Professor Bill McGuire, is a professor of Volcanology at University College London and is widely accepted as one of Britain's leading volcanologists. His main interests include monitoring volcanoes and global geophysical events. One of McGuire's main research points is the Yellowstone National Park supervolcano in Wyoming.

McGuire began his career as a lecturer at the West London Institute of Higher Education, part of the University of London, in the early 1980s. He now heads up the respected Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre at University College London.

McGuire has appeared on many TV shows including "Horizon", one of the BBCs most popular and successful "Science & Nature" programmes, "Countdown to Doomsday" on the Sci Fi Channel, and "Decoding the Past" ("Earth's Black Hole") on The History Channel. He's successfully positioned himself as a leading "go to man" in the UK whenever journalists want to write about geological disasters such as supervolcanoes, impact events, tsunamis and earthquakes. He is also notable for once describing Tokyo as "the city waiting to die", referring to its placement on a prominent geological fault that could result in a highly damaging earthquake.

His predictions on large magnitude events need to be taken with a pinch of salt for two reasons:

Firstly, his position at UCL is funded by Benfield, an insurance company.Fact|date=June 2008 It can be argued that he has therefore got vested interests in over-dramatising the risks of natural hazards to humanity, as insurance premiums would rise on the back of an expert opinion.

Secondly, he has been known in the past to make bold claims about the risk of a natural hazard that are outside his main field of expertise. For example, he has highlighted Tenerife and the surrounding islands as prime candidates for massive sector collapse, triggering a tsunami that would devaste the eastern coast of North America and the Caribbean. While there is a definite risk of collapse from these islands, there is evidence from scientists who specialise in this subject that the type of collapse may be by piecemeal, leading to a much smaller tsunami wave generation. It is also argued that landslide triggered tsunamis have a larger wavelength than earthquake generated tsunamis, which suggests that the rate of wave dissipation is greater, leading to a much smaller impact on the eastern seaboard [Masson et al., 2006] .

While Prof. McGuire should be commended for his outreach activites, particularly with the media, his comments and declarations can sometimes be intepreted as detrimental to hazard risk management and the public perception of risks from natural hazards.Fact|date=June 2008

References

External links

* [http://www.benfieldhrc.org/people/cvs/cv_bm.htm CV at Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre]
* http://www.teachersdomain.org/resources/ess05/sci/ess/earthsys/japan/index.html

* Masson et al., 2006. Submarine landslides: processes, triggers and hazards prediction. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society A, 364, Article number 1845. [http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/?k=extreme+natural+hazards&x=0&y=0]