Natural hazards articles within Nature Geoscience

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  • Comment |

    Globally, land- and fire-management policies have counterproductively caused cascading ecosystem changes that exacerbate, rather than mitigate, wildfires. Given rapidly changing climate and land-use conditions that amplify wildfire risk, a policy shift to adaptive management of fire regimes is urgently needed.

    • Mark A. Cochrane
    •  & David M. J. S. Bowman

  • Article |

    Iceberg gouging of continental slopes can initiate submarine landslides, potentially far from the iceberg source region, according to observations and geotechnical analysis of an event in a Baffin Island fjord.

    • Alexandre Normandeau
    • , Kevin MacKillop
    •  & John Hughes Clarke

  • News & Views |

    High-frequency radar tracking of icebergs floating in front of a glacier in Greenland show that movements of the ice mélange consistently increase before calving events, indicating that mélange has the potential to modulate calving.

    • Irena Vaňková

  • Article |

    Viscous deformation is a potentially prevalent mechanism of fault lubrication during earthquakes, according to laboratory experiments that simulate seismic faulting of various rock-forming minerals.

    • Giacomo Pozzi
    • , Nicola De Paola
    •  & Sylvie Demouchy

  • Editorial |

    Plate boundary faults in subduction zones can generate large earthquakes and tsunamis. Recent studies have revealed that these faults slip in various ways and may be influenced by many factors. Better understanding them should improve hazard assessments.

  • News & Views |

    Corals reveal that part of the plate-boundary fault near Sumatra slipped slowly and quietly for three decades before a large earthquake in 1861. The exceptional duration of this slip event has implications for interpreting deformation to assess seismic hazard.

    • Daniel Melnick

  • Article |

    Shallow parts of megathrusts up-dip of locked patches generally have a high slip rate deficit, which could mean tsunami hazard has been underestimated, according to a stress-constrained inversion of geodetic data.

    • Eric O. Lindsey
    • , Rishav Mallick
    •  & Emma M. Hill

  • Article |

    A 32-year-long slow-slip event occurred on a shallow part of the Sunda megathrust, perhaps because of stress accumulation after fluid expulsion, according to an analysis of the deformation history of the area and physics-based simulations.

    • Rishav Mallick
    • , Aron J. Meltzner
    •  & Emma M. Hill

  • News & Views |

    Near-surface stress patterns, influenced by topography, control the size and location of the largest landslides — but not necessarily smaller ones — according to a study of mountains at the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

    • Peter van der Beek

  • Article |

    Stress from tectonics and topography may be the primary control on the size of bedrock landslides, according to a comparison of a stress model with landslide inventories for a mountainous area in eastern Tibet.

    • Gen K. Li
    •  & Seulgi Moon

  • Article |

    Mantle heterogeneity beneath subducting plates may influence giant megathrust earthquakes, according to seismic tomography of the subslab structure beneath six megathrusts that have ruptured in M ≥ 9.0 earthquakes.

    • Jianke Fan
    •  & Dapeng Zhao

  • News & Views |

    Low viscosities may not preclude brittle magma fragmentation under certain conditions, according to field observations and experimental evidence that suggest the conditions for brittle fragmentation may be met in many explosive mafic eruptions.

    • Emma J. Liu

  • Article |

    In explosive basaltic eruptions, brittle fragmentation and subsequent healing by viscous melt are documented by textural analysis of products from ten disparate eruptions, suggesting that grain size may not reflect the initial fracture density of magma.

    • J. Taddeucci
    • , C. Cimarelli
    •  & F. Di Stefano

  • Article |

    In a Hawaiian fountain eruption, rapid gas expansion cools the melt below the glass transition temperature and causes brittle magma fragmentation, producing small, vesicular pyroclasts, according to observations of the 2018 eruption of Kīlauea.

    • Atsuko Namiki
    • , Matthew R. Patrick
    •  & Bruce F. Houghton

  • Article |

    Large-scale radiant heat flux increased in the years prior to eruptions at five volcanoes, probably due to enhanced underground hydrothermal activity, according to an analysis of satellite infrared data.

    • Társilo Girona
    • , Vincent Realmuto
    •  & Paul Lundgren

  • News & Views |

    Turbidites record ground motion in the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake. Recent events are now revealing how turbidites record earthquakes, but turbidites are triggered in many ways, and testing if ancient turbidites are earthquake-triggered remains challenging.

    • Peter J. Talling

  • Editorial |

    The world’s glaciers are shrinking, with knock-on impacts for local communities. We need a better grasp of the hazards they leave behind.

  • Comment |

    Geological and botanical archives can preserve evidence of exceptional floods going back centuries to millennia. Updated risk guidelines offer a new opportunity to apply lessons from paleoflood hydrology to judge the odds of future floods.

    • Scott St. George
    • , Amanda M. Hefner
    •  & Judith Avila

  • Article |

    Long fault ruptures that have both strike-slip and dip-slip components can propagate at a wide range of speeds, including those theoretically predicted to be unstable, according to numerical simulations.

    • Huihui Weng
    •  & Jean-Paul Ampuero

  • News & Views |

    Permanent surface deformation caused by the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes has been directly measured, constraining the mechanics of surface damage in earthquakes.

    • Wanpeng Feng
    •  & Rafael V. Almeida

  • Editorial |

    The ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic highlights the very human effort that is peer review. We will continue to do all we can to keep the papers flowing and thank our reviewers and authors for their help and understanding under these difficult circumstances.

  • Article |

    Tsunami generation by megathrust earthquakes is enhanced by extensional faulting in the upper plate when the subducting slab shallows, according to numerical modelling and observations from the Sumatra–Andaman and Tohoku earthquake–tsunami events.

    • Bar Oryan
    •  & W. Roger Buck

  • Article |

    Analyses of inventory models under two climate change projection scenarios suggest that carbon emissions from abrupt thaw of permafrost through ground collapse, erosion and landslides could contribute significantly to the overall permafrost carbon balance.

    • Merritt R. Turetsky
    • , Benjamin W. Abbott
    •  & A. David McGuire

  • Article |

    During the submarine eruption of gas-rich magma into shallow water, a gas-tight seal forms, breaks and reseals, a process that results in violent explosions and the release of large gas bubbles, suggest low-frequency sound data from Bogoslof volcano, Alaska.

    • John J. Lyons
    • , Matthew M. Haney
    •  & Christopher F. Waythomas

  • News & Views |

    Wet rice cultivation in the Palu Valley, Indonesia, prepared the ground for the devastating liquefaction-induced landslides that were triggered by the Mw 7.5 earthquake in 2018, suggest two studies of the spatial relationship between landslide morphology and irrigation.

    • Phil R. Cummins

  • Article |

    Seismicity induced by wastewater injections is widespread in Oklahoma, probably because its basement is susceptible to the reactivation of basement-rooted faults, according to three-dimensional seismic analyses, rock-mechanics experiments and field surveys.

    • F. Kolawole
    • , C. S. Johnston
    •  & B. M. Carpenter

  • Article |

    The European mega-heatwaves in 2003 and 2010 were intensified by torrents of hot air that were transported in from desiccated regions upwind, suggests an analysis of observations and reanalysis data together with a Lagrangian heat-tracking framework.

    • Dominik L. Schumacher
    • , Jessica Keune
    •  & Diego G. Miralles

  • Comment |

    Social media is increasingly being used to share near-real-time analysis of emergent and sometimes hazardous geological events. Such open discussion can drive new research directions and collaborations for geoscientists.

    • Stephen P. Hicks

  • Editorial |

    Geohazards can be too dangerous to study directly but too deadly to ignore. For these types of events, data from physical experiments can plug gaps in both hazard models and understanding.

  • News & Views |

    Pyroclastic density currents generate a basal air cushion that reduces friction with the ground, reveal laboratory experiments. This explains their ability to travel rapidly over large distances from their volcanic source.

    • Alain Burgisser

  • News & Views |

    A magnitude 7.5 strike-slip earthquake that struck Palu, Indonesia, in 2018 unexpectedly generated a devastating tsunami. Seismic data reveal that its rupture propagated fast, at supershear speed. Whether the two are connected remains to be seen.

    • P. Martin Mai

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