Publications

Ground failure due to liquefaction in loose sand deposits poses substantial risks to the built environment, and has caused significant damage in past earthquakes to a wide range of infrastructure. Advances in liquefaction hazard analysis in practice have largely stagnated in recent years; the state of practice remains rooted in simplified procedures that ignore considerable uncertainties in liquef

One of the most prominent challenges related to legacy seismic data is determining how these data can be appropriately used in modern research applications. The wide variety of instrumentation used in the analog era, the format of recording on paper wrapped around a helicorder drum, and limited metadata information introduces ambiguities that are not typical of modern digital data. Therefore, tech

In the past century, most eruptions of Steamboat Geyser in Yellowstone National Park's Norris Geyser Basin were mainly clustered in three episodes: 1961–1969, 1982–1984, and ongoing since 2018. These eruptive episodes resulted in extensive disturbance to surrounding trees. To characterize tree response over time as an indicator of geyser activity adjustments to climate variability, aerial and grou

Until recently, the lack of seafloor geodetic instrumentation and the use of unrealistically simple, half-space based forward models have resulted in poor resolution of near-trench slip in subduction zone settings. Here, we use a synthetic framework to investigate the impact of topography and geodetic data distribution on coseismic slip estimates in various subduction zone settings. We calculate s

The primary ingredients on the hazard side of the equation include the rapid characterization of the earthquake source and quantifying the spatial distribution of the shaking, plus any secondary hazards an earthquake may have triggered. On the earthquake impact side, loss calculations require the aforementioned hazard assessments—and their uncertainties—as input, plus the quantification of the exp

On May 25, 2014, a 54.5-million cubic meter rock avalanche in the West Salt Creek valley, Mesa County, Colorado, traveled 4.6 kilometers, leaving a deposit that covers about 2.2 square kilometers. To check the particle-size distribution of the deposit for information about the high mobility of the avalanche, we estimated boulder distribution density for the entire deposit by counting 1-meter (m) o

Steep landscapes evolve largely by debris flows, in addition to fluvial and hillslope processes. Abundant field observations document that debris flows incise valley bottoms and transport substantial sediment volumes, yet their contributions to steepland morphology remain uncertain. This has, in turn, limited the development of debris-flow incision rate formulations that produce morphology consist

The fore‐arc of the southern Cascadia subduction zone (CSZ), north of the Mendocino triple junction (MTJ), is home to a network of Quaternary‐active crustal faults that accumulate strain due to the interaction of the North American, Juan de Fuca (Gorda), and Pacific plates. These faults, including the Little Salmon and Mad River fault (LSF and MRF) zones, are located near the most populated parts

The steep, tectonically active terrain along the Central California (USA) coast is well known to produce deadly and destructive debris flows. However, the extent to which fire affects debris-flow susceptibility in this region is an open question. We documented the occurrence of postfire debris floods and flows following the landfall of a storm that delivered intense rainfall across multiple burn a

The 2020–2023 southwestern Puerto Rico seismic sequence, still ongoing in 2023, is remarkable for its multiple‐fault rupture complexity and elevated aftershock productivity. We applied an automatic workflow to continuous data from 43 seismic stations in Puerto Rico to build an enhanced earthquake catalog with ∼180,000 events for the 3+ yr sequence from 28 December 2019 to 1 January 2023. This work

Wildfire alters the hydrologic cycle, with important implications for water supply and hazards including flooding and debris flows. In this study we use a combination of electrical resistivity and stable water isotope analyses to investigate the hydrologic response during storms in three catchments: one unburned and two burned during the 2020 Bobcat Fire in the San Gabriel Mountains, California, U

IntroductionThe Rocky Mountains and the Colorado River Basin in the Western United States represent complex, interconnected systems that sustain a number of species, including tens of millions of humans. These systems face several challenges, including worsening drought, altered wildfire regimes, climate change, and the spread of invasive species. These factors can exacerbate one another, further