Welcome to the website of the Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS).

EOS was officially launched at the Nanyang Technological University in February 2009, to study and forecast natural phenomena threatening Southeast Asia.

Natural hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and global climate change pose major threats to our very young, 10,000-year-old, increasingly fragile civilization.

The first few years of the 21st century have provided ample evidence of our vulnerability and our exposure. The devastations of Acehnese and Thai coasts in 2004, of Kashmir and New Orleans in 2005, of southwest Java in 2006, of Sumatra again in 2007, western Sichuan and Myanmar in 2008 and, in the early days of 2010, of Haiti, comprise a nearly incessant litany of death, loss and suffering.

In some of these cases we knew well that we were living on dangerous ground; in other cases we did not. For example, New Orleans and Port au Prince had long been recognised as a catastrophe waiting to happen, but for a variety of reasons that knowledge had no effect. Similar incongruities exist here in Southeast Asia as well. There are places sitting in the jaws of a dragon that have no scientific awareness of the tenuousness of their existence. Such was the case of the hundreds of thousands who perished in Aceh and Kashmir.

These tragic examples, one of very basic ignorance and the other of the inability to translate knowledge into action, illustrate well the challenge of acquiring basic scientific knowledge of natural processes and then utilising it effectively and in a timely fashion.  

The Earth Observatory is well positioned to face this challenge. We intend to help blaze new paths through the fascinating mysteries of this dangerous, dynamic, thin shell of our planet that we call home. We look forward to sharing our research with civic leaders, engineers, planners, and many others working to make the world a safer and a more enjoyable place.
 
I hope you will find this website useful. Do send in your feedback on how we can meet your information needs even better.