Extreme weather and a warming climate can trigger cascading hazards that reshape landscapes and endanger infrastructure. This seminar explores how hydrology, climate, and geomorphology interact to cause or amplify land surface hazards, such as landslides, flooding, and permafrost degradation. By combining hydrologic modeling and remote sensing data, this work enhances understanding of the processes that link surface water, ground ice, and slope stability. The findings highlight the importance of interdisciplinary research in predicting and mitigating climate-related geohazards.

Groundwater renewability is a key factor in managing sustainable water resources in a changing climate. This seminar discusses new insights into groundwater age, flow pathways, and residence times across diverse aquifer systems. By integrating isotopic data and numerical modeling, the analysis reveals how recharge dynamics vary under different hydrogeologic settings. The results underscore the role of geologic structure and climate forcing in controlling groundwater sustainability and inform strategies for water management and policy.

The vast accumulation of carbon in Arctic soils—an estimated 1,700 Pg—has been referred to as a carbon bomb, a sleeping giant, and Pandora’s freezer. These terms all refer to the so-called ‘permafrost–carbon feedback,’ the cascading cycle in which warming temperatures destabilize permafrost soils, liberating large quantities of carbon to the atmosphere and driving further warming. But predicting whether Arctic landscapes will be a net source or sink of carbon requires tracking the transport and fate of the mobilized soil carbon and quantifying the strength of counteracting processes such as enhanced primary productivity of vegetation. I’ll show how the deposits of meandering rivers provide natural landscape-scale experiments that juxtapose frozen and thawed (permafrost and non-permafrost) terrain in the same environment, allowing us to track the changes to soil carbon and biomass reservoirs over timescales of years to millennia. These observations suggest that permafrost thaw may cause some Arctic landscapes to become a net carbon sink rather than a carbon source.

TBA