Cascading land surface hazards as a nexus in the Earth system
Citation
Yanites, B.J., Clark, M.K., Roering, J.J., West, A.J., Pierce, J. (2025). Cascading land surface hazards as a nexus in the Earth system. Science, 388(6754). Link to paper
Abstract
This Review synthesizes progress and outlines a new framework for understanding how land surface hazards interact and propagate as sediment cascades across Earth's surface. The research highlights a gap in understanding these interactions on human timescales, given rapid climatic change and urban expansion into hazard-prone zones, and reviews how surface processes such as coseismic landslides and post-fire debris flows form a complex sequence of events that exacerbate hazard susceptibility. Hazardous events such as fires, storms, and earthquakes accelerate erosion and sediment transport, increasing landscape sensitivity to subsequent perturbations, thus forming a cascading hazard. These cascading hazards can occur almost immediately after triggering events, such as coseismic landslides, or over months, years, or even decades after an initial perturbation, such as debris flows after wildfires or flooding in channels alluviated by volcanic debris.