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Ben Mirus

My research focuses on landslide hydrology and thresholds for landslide warning systems. My background is in hillslope hydrology and numerical modeling of surface and near-surface hydrological processes, which I apply to improve quantitative characterization of landslide initiation potential. I manage several real-time landslide monitoring sites and the national landslide inventory database.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

   2015-present      Research Geologist, Landslides Hazards Program, USGS, Golden, CO

   2013-2014            Assistant Professor, Department of Geological Sciences, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC

   2010-2013            Hydrologist, Unsaturated Zone Flow Project, USGS, Menlo Park, CA

   2005-2009            Physical Scientist, Unsaturated Zone Flow Project, USGS, Menlo Park, CA

 

EDUCATION

   2009                     Ph.D. in Hydrogeology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

   2001                     B.A. in Geology, Pomona College, Claremont, CA 

 

Science and Products

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slope with grass and trees

Sitka, AK

On August 18, 2015, heavy rainfall triggered around 60 landslides in and around the city of Sitka, AK. The landslides moved downslope rapidly; several were damaging and one of these demolished a home on South Kramer Avenue killing three people.
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards
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Sitka, AK

On August 18, 2015, heavy rainfall triggered around 60 landslides in and around the city of Sitka, AK. The landslides moved downslope rapidly; several were damaging and one of these demolished a home on South Kramer Avenue killing three people.
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Rain gage, solar panel, and data logger enclosure box.

Toro Negro, Puerto Rico

The USGS has installed instruments in a steep hillside northwest of the municipality of Villalba in the Toro Negro State Forest.
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center
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Toro Negro, Puerto Rico

The USGS has installed instruments in a steep hillside northwest of the municipality of Villalba in the Toro Negro State Forest.
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Area above Utuado where possible landslides initiation can occur.

Utuado, Puerto Rico

The USGS has installed instruments in a steep hillside east of the municipality of Utuado.
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center
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Utuado, Puerto Rico

The USGS has installed instruments in a steep hillside east of the municipality of Utuado.
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Landslide starting on the side of a cliff in the Seattle Area

Seattle Area, Washington

Monitoring at this site is for researching rainfall thresholds for forecasting landslide potential. Shallow landslides are common on coastal bluffs overlooking Puget Sound.
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center
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Seattle Area, Washington

Monitoring at this site is for researching rainfall thresholds for forecasting landslide potential. Shallow landslides are common on coastal bluffs overlooking Puget Sound.
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Photograph showing installation of a tensiometer at the Portland monitoring site.

Portland, Oregon

Landslides in the West Hills of Portland pose a hazard to people and property.
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center
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Portland, Oregon

Landslides in the West Hills of Portland pose a hazard to people and property.
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Employees digging into the ground to set up monitoring stations on the hillside of Knife Ridge

Knife Ridge, Elliott State Forest, Oregon

The USGS and its cooperators have installed instruments in a steep hillside about 20 km southeast of Reedsport in the Elliott State Forest.
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center
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Knife Ridge, Elliott State Forest, Oregon

The USGS and its cooperators have installed instruments in a steep hillside about 20 km southeast of Reedsport in the Elliott State Forest.
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Set up of solar powered monitoring station in the Nantahala National Forest by employees on a hillside

Poplar Cove, Nantahala National Forest, North Carolina

The USGS and its cooperators have installed instruments in a steep hillside about 17.5 km southwest of Franklin, NC in the Nantahala National Forest.
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center
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Poplar Cove, Nantahala National Forest, North Carolina

The USGS and its cooperators have installed instruments in a steep hillside about 17.5 km southwest of Franklin, NC in the Nantahala National Forest.
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Monitoring station in Coweeta Experimental Forest surrounded by trees on the side of a hill slope

Mooney Gap, Coweeta Experimental Forest, North Carolina

The USGS and its cooperators have installed instruments in a steep hillside about 16 km southeast of Otto, NC in the Coweeta Experimental Forest.
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center
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Mooney Gap, Coweeta Experimental Forest, North Carolina

The USGS and its cooperators have installed instruments in a steep hillside about 16 km southeast of Otto, NC in the Coweeta Experimental Forest.
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Solar powered instruments installed in Bent Creek Experimental Forest to help determine what is controlling the landslide

Bent Creek Experimental Forest, North Carolina

The USGS and its cooperators have installed instruments in a steep hillside about 38.5 km south of Asheville, NC in the Bent Creek Experimental Forest.
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center
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Bent Creek Experimental Forest, North Carolina

The USGS and its cooperators have installed instruments in a steep hillside about 38.5 km south of Asheville, NC in the Bent Creek Experimental Forest.
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Map of Puget Sound Washington, showing location of the field site in Mukilteo.

Landslides Can Cause More Landslides

Release Date: MAY 15, 2018The deadliest individual landslides in the U.S. recently were in places where there had previously been a landslide. Why do landslides happen in the same place instead of on nearby slopes that appear to be just as likely, if not more likely, to slide?
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards
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Landslides Can Cause More Landslides

Release Date: MAY 15, 2018The deadliest individual landslides in the U.S. recently were in places where there had previously been a landslide. Why do landslides happen in the same place instead of on nearby slopes that appear to be just as likely, if not more likely, to slide?
Learn More
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USGS science for a changing world logo

Integrating Disparate Spatial Datasets from Local to National Scale for Open-Access Web-Based Visualization and Analysis: A Case Study Compiling U.S. Landslide Inventories

Spatial data on landslide occurrence across the U.S. varies greatly in quality, accessibility, and extent. This problem of data variability is common across USGS Mission Areas; it presents an obstacle to developing national-scale products and to identifying areas with relatively good/bad data coverage. We compiled available data of known landslides into a national-scale, searchable online map, whi
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Community for Data Integration (CDI)
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Integrating Disparate Spatial Datasets from Local to National Scale for Open-Access Web-Based Visualization and Analysis: A Case Study Compiling U.S. Landslide Inventories

Spatial data on landslide occurrence across the U.S. varies greatly in quality, accessibility, and extent. This problem of data variability is common across USGS Mission Areas; it presents an obstacle to developing national-scale products and to identifying areas with relatively good/bad data coverage. We compiled available data of known landslides into a national-scale, searchable online map, whi
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Hydrologic, slope movement, and soil property data from the coastal bluffs of the Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, 2016-2018

Seasonal variations in vegetation, rainfall, and soil moisture conditions have the potential to impact the slope stability of locally forested coastal bluffs in the Atlantic Highlands of New Jersey. Both the seasonality and rainfall amounts of the two types of storms that induce shallow landslides in the area vary considerably. Most of the documented historical landslides are the result of heavy r
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Florence Bascom Geoscience Center

Time-lapse photography of an active coastal-bluff landslide, Mukilteo, Washington, August 2015 - May 2016

A time-lapse camera was used to document periodic reactivation of a complex landslide on a steep coastal bluff in Mukilteo, Washington. This landslide is one of four monitoring sites initiated by the U.S Geological Survey to investigate hill-slope hydrology and landslide hazards affecting the railway corridor along the eastern shore of Puget Sound between the cities of Seattle and Everett (Mirus e
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Earthquake Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center

Results of Hydrologic Monitoring on Landslide-prone Coastal Bluffs near Mukilteo, Washington

A hydrologic monitoring network was installed to investigate landslide hazards affecting the railway corridor along the eastern shore of Puget Sound between Seattle and Everett, near Mukilteo, Washington. During the summer of 2015, the U.S. Geological Survey installed instrumentation at four sites to measure rainfall and air temperature every 15 minutes. Two of the four sites are installed on cont
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Landslide Hazards
Filter Total Items: 38

Clays are not created equal: How clay mineral type affects soil parameterization

Clay minerals dominate the soil colloidal fraction and its specific surface area. Differences among clay mineral types significantly influence their effects on soil hydrological and mechanical behavior. Presently, the soil clay content is used to parameterize soil hydraulic and mechanical properties (SHMP) for land surface models while disregarding the type of clay mineral. This undifferentiated u
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Natural Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center

HydroMet: A new code for automated objective optimization of hydrometeorological thresholds for landslide initiation

Landslide detection and warning systems are important tools for mitigation of potential hazards in landslide prone areas. Traditionally, warning systems for shallow landslides have been informed by rainfall intensity-duration thresholds. More recent advances have introduced the concept of hydrometeorological thresholds that are informed not only by rainfall, but also by subsurface hydrological mea
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center

Evaluation of techniques for mitigating snowmelt infiltration-induced landsliding in a highway embankment

Infiltration-induced landslides threaten transportation infrastructure around the world, and impose both direct costs through repair and remediation work and indirect costs through lost economic activity. Therefore, finding the most cost-effective techniques to mitigate slope failures that can impact critical infrastructure links is desirable. The Straight Creek landslide, which affects a segment
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center

Rapid-response unsaturated zone hydrology: Small-scale data, small-scale theory, big problems

The unsaturated zone (UZ) extends across the Earth’s terrestrial surface and is central to many problems related to land and water resource management. Flow of water through the UZ is typically thought to be slow and diffusive, such that it could attenuate fluxes and dampen variability between atmospheric inputs and underlying aquifer systems. This would reduce water resource vulnerability to cont
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Natural Hazards, Water Resources, Geologic Hazards Science Center, Geology, Energy & Minerals Science Center

Numerical analysis of the effect of subgrid variability in a physically based hydrological model on runoff, soil moisture, and slope stability

In coarse resolution hydrological modeling we face the problem of subgrid variability, the effects of which are difficult to express and are often hidden in the parameterization and calibration. We present a numerical experiment with the physically based hydrological model ParFlow‐CLM with which we quantify the effect of subgrid heterogeneities in headwater catchments within the cell size typicall
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center

Incorporating the effects of complex soil layering and thickness local variability into distributed landslide susceptibility assessments

Incorporating the influence of soil layering and local variability into the parameterizations of physics-based numerical models for distributed landslide susceptibility assessments remains a challenge. Typical applications employ substantial simplifications including homogeneous soil units and soil-hydraulic properties assigned based only on average textural classifications; the potential impact o
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center

Hillslopes in humid-tropical climates aren’t always wet: Implications for hydrologic response and landslide initiation in Puerto Rico, USA

The devastating impacts of the widespread flooding and landsliding in Puerto Rico following the September 2017 landfall of Hurricane Maria highlight the increasingly extreme atmospheric disturbances and enhanced hazard potential in mountainous humid‐tropical climate zones. Long‐standing conceptual models for hydrologically driven hazards in Puerto Rico posit that hillslope soils remain wet through
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center

Deep Learning as a tool to forecast hydrologic response for landslide-prone hillslopes

Empirical thresholds for landslide warning systems have benefitted from the incorporation of soil‐hydrologic monitoring data, but the mechanistic basis for their predictive capabilities is limited. Although physically based hydrologic models can accurately simulate changes in soil moisture and pore pressure that promote landslides, their utility is restricted by high computational costs and nonuni
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Natural Hazards, National Cooperative Geologic Mapping Program, Geologic Hazards Science Center

Community for data integration 2018 funded project report

The U.S. Geological Survey Community for Data Integration annually funds small projects focusing on data integration for interdisciplinary research, innovative data management, and demonstration of new technologies. This report provides a summary of the 10 projects funded in fiscal year 2018, outlining their goals, activities, and accomplishments.
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Science Analytics and Synthesis (SAS), Community for Data Integration (CDI)

Temporal and spatial variability of shallow soil moisture across four planar hillslopes on a tropical ocean island, San Cristóbal, Galápagos

Study Region: This paper provides a summary of findings from temporal and spatial studies of soil water content on planar hillslopes across the equatorial island of San Cristóbal, Galápagos (Ecuador). Study Focus: Soil water content (SWC) was measured to generate temporal and spatial records to determine seasonal variation and to investigate how the behavior of surface and near-surface root-zone
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center

Landslides across the United States: Occurrence, susceptibility, and data limitations

Detailed information about landslide occurrence is the foundation for advancing process understanding, susceptibility mapping, and risk reduction. Despite the recent revolution in digital elevation data and remote sensing technologies, landslide mapping remains resource intensive. Consequently, a modern, comprehensive map of landslide occurrence across the United States (USA) has not been compiled
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center

The future of landslides’ past—A framework for assessing consecutive landsliding systems

Landslides often happen where they have already occurred in the past. The potential of landslides to reduce or enhance conditions for further landsliding has long been recognized and has often been reported, but the mechanisms and spatial and temporal scales of these processes have previously received little specific attention. Despite a preponderance of qualitative and anecdotal evidence, there h
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Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center

Pre-USGS Publications

Science and Products