All Publications

Forecasting wet snow avalanches remains a major challenge due to their temporal and spatial variability. Long-term climate trends are producing more variable and extreme weather, creating conditions outside historical experience, and increasing forecasting uncertainties. To assess how climate change affects the frequency and timing of wet snow avalanches, we examined the long-term...

Wet slab avalanches (WSAs) release when liquid water reduces the strength of a buried weak layer or interface, and their timing is governed primarily by the snowpack energy balance and the movement of meltwater. We classified 717 WSAs from the Colorado Avalanche Information Center database (2011–2025) into five start-zone terrain categories and analysed the timing of naturally triggered...

Avalanche destructive (D) size classifications are essential for forecasting, communication, and risk management, yet size estimation remains one of the more subjective elements of avalanche assessment. Practitioners typically rely on visual impressions of destructive potential, path length, and estimated mass and volume. Recent work indicates that size is often underestimated even by...

Glide avalanches pose a notable hazard during annual spring snow removal operations along the Going-to-the-Sun Road (GTSR) in Glacier National Park (GNP), USA. Glide cracks consistently form on specific slopes near and above the GTSR. Some glide crack locations produce glide avalanches most years (known as repeater paths), whereas others are less predictable and either release or melt in...

Quantifying aeolian processes is important to decision-making in river management and for optimizing strategies for ecosystem conservation, natural resource management, and recreation. We applied the AeoLiS aeolian transport model, originally developed for coastal environments, to a dryland river corridor to evaluate its ability to simulate sediment dynamics in a fluvial-aeolian system...

While conducting avalanche mitigation or traveling through the backcountry, avalanche professionals sometimes experience a "whumpf": a collapse-mode crack accompanied by surface cracking that does not produce an avalanche. These whumpfs are a clear warning sign of instability in the surrounding terrain. But assessing the collapsed slope itself, if it is steep enough to avalanche, carries...

Mount Veniaminof is a frequently active, open-system arc volcano on the Alaska Peninsula, part of the Alaska-Aleutian arc. Mount Veniaminof's September–December 2018 eruption began with small lava flows and culminated in a larger explosive event in November that produced a 450 km long continuous ash plume—one of the volcano's most significant ash-producing events in recently observed...

Metal sulfide minerals are abundant phases in many environments on earth, including seafloor massive sulfide (SMS) deposits, which occur at hydrothermal vents throughout the global ocean. These deep-sea settings are currently undergoing exploration for potential future mining. Here, we describe rocks from Escanaba Trough on the southern Gorda Ridge that underwent spontaneous combustion...

Northern bobwhites (Colinus virginianus) have experienced widespread declines across their range, increasing the need for population monitoring across broad spatial and temporal scales. Yet large-scale monitoring of post-breeding bobwhites remains limited by the time-intensive nature of fall (i.e., autumn) covey counts. Passive acoustic monitoring with autonomous recording units (ARUs)...

The Sheep Creek area in southwest Montana contains a number of small, tabular, carbonatite-related deposits that are rich in Nb and REE minerals. Nb-rich minerals from Sheep Creek and nearby Woods Creek are herein described in detail. The carbonatite veins contain a mix of calcite and Fe-bearing dolomite, with locally abundant apatite, baryte, celsian, actinolite, phlogopite, monazite-...

This study investigates the geochemical characteristics of brines within the Upper Jurassic Smackover Formation in Alabama and Arkansas through elemental and isotopic analyses and geochemical modeling to reveal the extent and nature of fluid mixing and water-rock interactions. Smackover Formation brines exhibit Na-Cl-Ca hydrogeochemical facies and sulfate depletion relative to seawater...

1.Individual movement strategies govern access to important habitats but can expose certain animals to spatially and temporally variable threats, producing consistent, phenotype-specific differences in risk. For endangered Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus), migration timing shapes exposure risk to vessel strikes, dredging activity, and shifting estuarine conditions, yet management...