All chapters have been updated and revised. Several chapters have been extensively reorganized and expanded. There are 16 new photos, 19 new tables, and 24 new pieces of line art.

Chapter 1: Natural Disasters and Their Energy Sources
Significantly revised and expanded. Chapter leads off with updated and expanded data on natural disasters and hazards including death and destruction, and economic and insured losses. The text on energy flow has been much expanded.

Chapter 2: Plate Tectonics and Earthquakes
Updated. Added 2001 Gujurat EQ. Expanded text on material behavior, uniformitarianism, continental drift, and seismic gaps.

Chapter 3: Basic Principles of Earthquake Geology, Seismology, and Tsunami
Updated and reorganized. Tsunami discussion expanded to include eastern North America and Lake Tahoe. Increased discussion of wave frequency and period, including a music example, and EQ intensity including Shake Maps.

Chapter 4: Some Earthquakes in Western North America
Updated. Landers EQ discussion expanded to show how a fault ruptures.

Chapter 5: More United States and Canadian Earthquakes
Updated. Added 2001 Puget Sound EQ. New Sidebar on human-caused EQs including the 2001 Ohio EQ.

Chapter 6: Volcanic Eruptions: Plate Tectonics and Magmas

Chapter 7: Volcanic Eruptions Continue
Totally revamped and reorganized into one continuous sequence. Begins with a brief on plate tectonics followed by a full development of magma characteristics then plate tectonics are revisited. Eruptions are explained using the 3 Vs - viscosity, volatiles, and volume with end members of flood basalts, shield volcanoes, scoria cones, stratovolcanoes, lava domes, and calderas. Each type covers eruption products, landforms, and eruption styles. More case histories follow based first on plate tectonics - Iceland and the Pacific Northwest, and then by fatal processes - pyroclastic flows, lahars, gas, tsunami, lava flows, and debris avalanches.

Chapter 8: Mass Movements
Updated. Added Turnagain Heights, Alaska lateral spreading, Canadian quick-clay flows, and Mexico City subsidence due to groundwater withdrawal.

Chapter 9: Climate Change
Significant expansion. New sections on The Last Thousand Years, and Global Warming in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Expanded text on the Little Ice Age, Maunder Minimum, Medieval Maximum, La Nina. Introduction of La Nada. Volcanism and climate expanded with the Toba event.

Chapter 10: Severe Weather
Significant expansion of latent heat, adiabatic processes, Coriolis effect, humidity, dewpoint, lifting condensation level, nor-easters, and how a thunderstorm forms.

Chapter 11: Hurricanes and the Coastline
Updated. Added Tropical Storm Allison, and a section on reduction of hurricane damages using building codes and planning. Expansion of latent heat, intertropical convergence zone, hurricane abundance during El Nino and La Nina.

Chapter 12: Floods
Added 1% chance floods, and presidential disaster declarations. Expanded text on role of levees, cumulative versus yearly probabilities, and tie between melt-water floods and climate change.

Chapter 13: Fire
Significantly expanded including 7 new figures and 5 new tables (wildland fire data, the year 2000, prescribed fires). New sections on the Fire Triangle, La Nina, and Yellowstone: Ten Years Later. Expanded text on ladder fuels, and chaparral.

Chapter 14: The Great Dyings
Updated. New section on Pleisticene extinctions in Australia, and Holocene extinctions in New Zealand and Madagascar. Update on Siberian Traps.

Chapter 15: Impacts With Space Objects
Updates on NEOs and NEAs with new figures and tables, and map of North American impact sites.

Chapter 16: Population Growth
All tables and text updated. New analysis of future population growth.