Abstract: Many natural hazards have been well known and qualitatively understood for decades, but still lack accurate measures of how damaging future events will be. For example, it still remains a question as to how quickly the great ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland will respond to climate change to cause sea level rise, and whether early warning for debris flows can be successfully implemented. For both of these examples, a key need is to better understand the mechanics of the underlying geophysical processes. In this talk, I introduce the basic mechanical principles related to ice sheet flow and debris flow damage, and explain how application of these simple principles results in an enhanced ability to quantify certain aspects of these hazards.
Biosketch: Victor has a broad range of geophysical interests from understanding earthquake mechanics and hazards to predicting the future of melting and collapse of glaciers and ice sheets. He enjoys simplifying the complexity of geophysical phenomena to make them tractable to comprehend and model mechanistically. Victor joined the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Brown University in 2019, where he is a professor of geophysics. He was previously a professor of geophysics at Caltech for eight years, and a postdoc at the US Geological Survey for two years. He earned his B.S. in geophysics at Caltech and his Ph.D. at Harvard University.
Andrew Liguori
Email