CLaSH - Center for Land Surface Hazards

The Center for Land Surface Hazards (CLaSH) Catalyst confronts the challenge of understanding interconnections between hazards that can greatly magnify their effects – such as earthquakes that trigger landsliding, river alluviation, damming and later flooding, or storms that follow wildfire and trigger debris flows and floods. These cascading hazards – sequences of events in which one geohazard triggers another, resulting in cumulative impacts that are more severe than the sum of the individual events – are globally pervasive and have a widespread impact on communities and society. The pace and impact of these cascades are rapidly increasing in the face of global change and population growth, yet most research focuses on singular hazards, rather than the connections between them. Coordinated science efforts are urgently needed to understand how land surface processes work in tandem and in a changing world. The CLaSH vision is based on the premise that hazard research and education can be transformed by coordinated modeling and data acquisition to address the couplings of surface and solid Earth processes. The CLaSH Catalyst embraces the unique opportunity to test drive the concept for a Center that can build connections between currently disparate research communities. To achieve this goal, Catalyst activities aim to engage the scientific community in the Center design.

Come join us because there’s so much to discover on the surfaces!

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