Evolving climate patterns and land use changes, coupled with improved monitoring capabilities, are contributing to a notable increase in seismic and infrasound detections of surficial mass movements. These events — landslides, rock/ice/snow avalanches, debris flows, lahars, pyroclastic density currents, glacial processes, etc. — can pose significant hazards, and there is a pressing need to better understand, characterize, and mitigate them. While these sources are not routinely monitored in real-time like earthquakes, ever-expanding seismic and infrasound networks offer opportunities for rapid early warning and post-event detection and analysis. Improved data sources and techniques can also help search for reliable precursors to catastrophic failure and can be used to characterize existing slope instabilities.

This session explores innovative methods that improve our comprehension of these non-earthquake seismic and acoustic sources and enhance our ability to characterize and monitor them and mitigate their associated hazards. We invite presentations that investigate various types of surficial mass movements by leveraging seismic and/or infrasound techniques, including the application of machine learning or inclusion of ancillary constraints through ground-based, airborne, and satellite imagery or other geophysical data streams. Topics of interest encompass — but are not limited to — source detection, location, characterization, modeling, and classification; precursory signal analysis; monitoring; innovative instrumentation (e.g., distributed acoustic sensing, nodal sensors, large-N arrays/networks); and hazard mitigation.