Mountains are iconic landscapes, vital water sources, and home to millions of people. In steep, high-elevation environments such as the Alps, Himalaya, Andes, and Rockies, extreme floods, debris flows, and other catastrophic hazards often originate at altitude and propagate downstream, amplifying their impacts. These events may be widespread or highly localized, and are typically triggered by earthquakes, intense storms, or sequences of compounding factors such as rapid snowpack warming, rain on frozen ground, moraine-dam failures, avalanches, or landslides that initiate further mass mobilization.
Ongoing climate warming is shifting glacier equilibrium lines and freezing zones upslope, exposing vast areas of formerly ice-bound sedimentary material to potential mobilization by extreme floods or mass flows. Their high-altitude position, combined with gravitational potential energy on steep mountain slopes, makes them especially susceptible to cascading hazards in the future.
This session invites contributions that investigate, across spatial and temporal scales:
• catastrophic sediment mobilization and cascading hazard chains
• processes and hazards linked to deposition and runout
• concepts of compounding and cascading dynamics
• connectivity between hillslopes and river networks
• feedbacks between stabilizing and destabilizing slope processes
We welcome presentations employing observational, conceptual, methodological, or modeling approaches, individually or in combination, across diverse mountain environments. Early-career scientists are particularly encouraged to contribute.
Qiuyang Chen