Eyjafjallajökull and 9/11: The Impact of Large-Scale Disasters on Worldwide Mobility

Large-scale disasters that interfere with globalized socio-technical infrastructure, such as mobility and transportation networks, trigger high socio-economic costs. Although the origin of such events is often geographically confined, their impact reverberates through entire networks in ways that ar...

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Main Authors:	Woolley-Meza, Olivia, Grady, Daniel, Thiemann, Christian, Bagrow, James P., Brockmann, Dirk
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Public Library of Science 2013
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737197/

id	pubmed-3737197
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-37371972013-08-15 Eyjafjallajökull and 9/11: The Impact of Large-Scale Disasters on Worldwide Mobility Woolley-Meza, Olivia Grady, Daniel Thiemann, Christian Bagrow, James P. Brockmann, Dirk Research Article Large-scale disasters that interfere with globalized socio-technical infrastructure, such as mobility and transportation networks, trigger high socio-economic costs. Although the origin of such events is often geographically confined, their impact reverberates through entire networks in ways that are poorly understood, difficult to assess, and even more difficult to predict. We investigate how the eruption of volcano Eyjafjallajökull, the September 11th terrorist attacks, and geographical disruptions in general interfere with worldwide mobility. To do this we track changes in effective distance in the worldwide air transportation network from the perspective of individual airports. We find that universal features exist across these events: airport susceptibilities to regional disruptions follow similar, strongly heterogeneous distributions that lack a scale. On the other hand, airports are more uniformly susceptible to attacks that target the most important hubs in the network, exhibiting a well-defined scale. The statistical behavior of susceptibility can be characterized by a single scaling exponent. Using scaling arguments that capture the interplay between individual airport characteristics and the structural properties of routes we can recover the exponent for all types of disruption. We find that the same mechanisms responsible for efficient passenger flow may also keep the system in a vulnerable state. Our approach can be applied to understand the impact of large, correlated disruptions in financial systems, ecosystems and other systems with a complex interaction structure between heterogeneous components. Public Library of Science 2013-08-07 /pmc/articles/PMC3737197/ /pubmed/23950904 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0069829 Text en © 2013 Woolley-Meza et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Woolley-Meza, Olivia Grady, Daniel Thiemann, Christian Bagrow, James P. Brockmann, Dirk
spellingShingle	Woolley-Meza, Olivia Grady, Daniel Thiemann, Christian Bagrow, James P. Brockmann, Dirk Eyjafjallajökull and 9/11: The Impact of Large-Scale Disasters on Worldwide Mobility
author_facet	Woolley-Meza, Olivia Grady, Daniel Thiemann, Christian Bagrow, James P. Brockmann, Dirk
author_sort	Woolley-Meza, Olivia
title	Eyjafjallajökull and 9/11: The Impact of Large-Scale Disasters on Worldwide Mobility
title_short	Eyjafjallajökull and 9/11: The Impact of Large-Scale Disasters on Worldwide Mobility
title_full	Eyjafjallajökull and 9/11: The Impact of Large-Scale Disasters on Worldwide Mobility
title_fullStr	Eyjafjallajökull and 9/11: The Impact of Large-Scale Disasters on Worldwide Mobility
title_full_unstemmed	Eyjafjallajökull and 9/11: The Impact of Large-Scale Disasters on Worldwide Mobility
title_sort	eyjafjallajökull and 9/11: the impact of large-scale disasters on worldwide mobility
description	Large-scale disasters that interfere with globalized socio-technical infrastructure, such as mobility and transportation networks, trigger high socio-economic costs. Although the origin of such events is often geographically confined, their impact reverberates through entire networks in ways that are poorly understood, difficult to assess, and even more difficult to predict. We investigate how the eruption of volcano Eyjafjallajökull, the September 11th terrorist attacks, and geographical disruptions in general interfere with worldwide mobility. To do this we track changes in effective distance in the worldwide air transportation network from the perspective of individual airports. We find that universal features exist across these events: airport susceptibilities to regional disruptions follow similar, strongly heterogeneous distributions that lack a scale. On the other hand, airports are more uniformly susceptible to attacks that target the most important hubs in the network, exhibiting a well-defined scale. The statistical behavior of susceptibility can be characterized by a single scaling exponent. Using scaling arguments that capture the interplay between individual airport characteristics and the structural properties of routes we can recover the exponent for all types of disruption. We find that the same mechanisms responsible for efficient passenger flow may also keep the system in a vulnerable state. Our approach can be applied to understand the impact of large, correlated disruptions in financial systems, ecosystems and other systems with a complex interaction structure between heterogeneous components.
publisher	Public Library of Science
publishDate	2013
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737197/
_version_	1612001569531756544

Eyjafjallajökull and 9/11: The Impact of Large-Scale Disasters on Worldwide Mobility

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