Mountains are iconic landmarks, impressive sides, water sources, and home to many people. In the high elevation and over-steepened topography of the high mountain ranges such as the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, and Rockies, to name a few, catastrophic hazards unfold from high elevations, and trigger often associated events on their long way downstream, amplifying the effects even further. These events can be widespread or start in very confined and localized places. Typically, they are triggered by earthquakes, severe storms, and/or a concatenation of events like rapid warming of high-elevation snowpack, rain on frozen ground, the failure of a moraine-dammed lake, avalanches or landslides triggering further mass mobilization and so forth. As global warming progresses and equilibrium altitude lines of glaciers and freezing zones in general move upslope, large areas become ice-free and uncover large amounts of now mobile materials that were frozen and stable before. These freshly exposed, often easily erodible materials add now to the overall thread. Their location at high elevations and with the altitude-associated potential energy make these materials even more prone to compounding events in the future.
We welcome contributions investigating in space and time:
- catastrophic mobilization of sediments and cascading events
- hazards associated with deposition and runout features
- concepts of compounding and cascading dynamics
- connectivity between hillslopes and river networks
- feedback loops of stabilizing and destabilizing processes on the slopes
We invite presentations that focus on observational, conceptual, methodological, or modeling approaches or a combination of those in all kinds of mountain environments and particularly encourage early career scientists to apply for this session.