U-M awarded $15 million NSF grant to transform the science of natural hazards

(Press-News.org) ANN ARBOR—The University of Michigan, in collaboration with more than a dozen academic, governmental and community partners across the country, will launch the Center for Land Surface Hazards.

CLaSH is a new center aimed at advancing research on the fundamental science processes that cause landsliding, river erosion, debris flows and flooding.      

When hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes or other natural disasters tear through communities, the change they wreak upon the landscape can trigger other disastrous events such as landslides and flooding. But it has been difficult to predict how these events connect to one another, with what intensity and for how long the domino effect of related hazards, called cascading land surface hazards, will occur.

CLaSH will address this challenge in hazards research by developing new scientific frameworks and modeling tools to forecast and mitigate cascading hazards. The center, directed by Marin Clark, a professor in the U-M Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, also plans to focus on programs that broaden and grow a workforce of experts in land surface hazards as well as foster community engagement in the interest of national welfare, especially in communities most affected by land surface hazards.

CLaSH will be funded by a five-year, $15 million grant from the Centers for Innovation and Community Engagement in Solid Earth Geohazards program at the U.S. National Science Foundation, and will be housed in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, part of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at U-M. 

"What's new about our center is that we're not just looking at a single hazard phenomenon. We're really looking at a series of processes that create land surface hazards and how they link together," said Clark, principal investigator of the center. 

"Hazards are increasing and they're increasing at an alarming rate. But unlike earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, which happen only in certain areas, land surface hazards happen everywhere, in all 50 states, and they have happened here in Michigan. They can also continue for years to decades, so it's important for the health of society to be more prepared for these types of common hazards."

For example, Hurricane Helene's landfall in 2024 generated widespread landsliding and mudflows throughout North Carolina. That caused sediment to move into river channels, which may change the flood risk in 2025 and following years. The CLaSH scientists want to be able to forecast where new flooding might occur and how long those hazards persist.

Additionally, Clark says, human populations are growing, causing urban areas to expand, pushing people into more rural locations where they may be more exposed to these cascading hazards. Relying on the various expertise of partner geoscientists, climate scientists, engineers, technicians, graduate students and undergraduate students will amplify the center's ability to understand when and where these events might occur, how they impact communities and how communities can recover after experiencing a catastrophe.

"By bringing together a team of scientists and engineers across disciplines, we can link fundamental Earth-surface processes to hazards in ways that no single investigator could accomplish alone," said co-principal investigator Brian Yanites, associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Indiana University, who studies river systems and their associated hazards, including how floods, sediment movement and channel change interact with landslides and other land surface processes.

Dimitrios Zekkos, geotechnical engineer with expertise in soil and rock mechanics as well as infrastructure resiliency against natural disasters, is a co-principal investigator and a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. 

"Recent technological advances in remote sensing, robots and sensors provide an unprecedented opportunity to monitor the geologic processes in a way that was completely impossible only a few years ago," Zekkos said. "These advances paired with new computational tools such as artificial intelligence and regional geologic process simulations provide a truly unprecedented opportunity to advance our scientific understanding of how geologic processes are coupled and lead to geohazard cascades."

CLaSH will also provide workforce programs to help educate the next generation of scientists, including outreach into communities most impacted by land surface hazards. Within these communities, the center hopes to implement programs that set the foundation for future hazard research as well as translating that knowledge into action to improve disaster preparation and response. To do this, the center will provide training for instructors at two-year community colleges and undergraduate institutions as well as concentrating on public outreach.

"CLaSH offers us an opportunity to build a research community that crosses disciplinary silos and confronts the complexity of interconnected hazards, while raising public awareness at the same time," said Josh West, co-principal investigator and professor of earth sciences and environmental studies at the University of Southern California. 

"Additional advances in technology, such as the increased availability of satellite imagery, drones and sensors, put us in a really exciting position to make headway in understanding these hazard cascades."

Josh Roering, professor of earth sciences at the University of Oregon, studies processes that shape hillslopes, including weathering, erosion, soil formation and landslide processes.

"This new center is so exciting because it recognizes how surface hazards are increasing in frequency and impact," he said. "By bringing together a community of scholars to study these surface hazards, we will improve our knowledge and more importantly help translate that knowledge to reduce risk and improve public safety."

The proposal for the new fully fledged center was developed as a part of a previously funded two-year award from the NSF for a Center Catalyst in 2022 and was supported by Jill Jividen and Adrianna Trusiak in the Research Development and Proposal Services unit of the U-M Office for Vice President of Research.

The center includes 17 funded partner organizations, including universities, government organizations and tribal partners as well as dozens of other U.S. and international collaborations with a variety of academic, government, nonprofit and business organizations.

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