Deconstructing landscape legacies of cataclysmic mass flows (SuperSlug)

SUPERSLUG will push the frontiers of scientific knowledge and technical innovation by revealing fundamental new insights into sediment transport legacies of catastrophic geomorphological disturbances in mountain landscapes, such as landslides, rock-ice avalanches, outburst floods, and debris flows and debris floods. These events, which are extreme forms of sediment-rich flows (SRF), entrain, mobilise and deposit vast quantities of sediment. SRFs have caused tens of thousands of deaths globally, destroy or damage important assets (e.g. hydropower projects; HPP), degrade water quality and ecosystems, and generate secondary hazards such as landsliding along populated river corridors. Globally, vulnerable communities and assets are at risk from immediate geohazard impacts but also from so-called legacy impacts which are typically overlooked and unquantified and can have greater spatial and temporal reach than an initial extreme SRF.

Impact

Researchers aligned to the geomorphological, glaciological, hydrological and geohazard sciences will benefit via our dissemination of results in international OA journals, at conferences, and project-aligned workshops, as will those working in the emerging field of critical physical geography, which can bridge to the social sciences. Technical advances will benefit those working in the fields of environmental sensors and machine learning-enabled environmental observation, including through open-access and well-documented provision of our tools and their workflows. Those in broader society, including hazard management practitioners, and M.Tech Disaster Management Mitigation students at IITR will benefit from bespoke training workshops in the use of numerical flood- and landscape evolution modelling. Step-changes in understanding fluvial sediment fluxes and superslug behaviour in SRF-affected catchments will benefit Indian hydropower operators, who will be able to adapt their current or future operations to minimise economic impacts and maintain regional water and energy security. We will access these groups via in-country project partners (Wadia Institute for Himalayan Geology, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, who we will engage with in a dual-role with minor costs for workshop organisation and servicing field equipment).