Center for Land-Surface Hazards (CLaSH): What it is, what we’ve been doing, and opportunities for engagement with the SCEC community

Josh West, Marin Clark, Dimitrios Zekkos, Josh Roering, & Brian Yanites

Submitted September 7, 2025, SCEC Contribution #14751, 2025 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #TBD

Hazard cascades involve sequences of events in which one geohazard — like an earthquake — triggers others, like landslides, and those in turn can propagate to further hazards, such as fluvial aggradation and flooding. With cumulative impacts that are more severe than the sum of the individual events, cascading hazards have a widespread impact on society, and their pace is rapidly increasing in the face of global change and population growth. The Center for Land Surface Hazards (CLaSH) has emerged in response to the urgent need for coordinated science efforts to understand how land surface processes work together to generate cascading geohazards in a changing world. While most research focuses on individual hazards, interacting cascading hazards are more severe or last longer—sometimes persisting for years or decades—and can have enormous cumulative impact that is often underestimated. Forecasting that impact requires integrating and modeling processes to predict interactions that amplify hazardous conditions. With Catalyst funding from NSF over the past 3 years, CLaSH has worked to galvanize the scientific community and enable innovative research on interconnected land-surface hazards, develop workforce and training opportunities, and inform community preparation and response. This presentation will provide an overview of the Center for Land Surface Hazards (CLaSH) Catalyst accomplishments and proposed future plans for research and community engagement — with an emphasis on connections to the earthquake science community (including SCEC) as part of better understanding and forecasting the hazard chain initiated by large earthquakes.

Key Words
landslides, cascading hazards

Citation
West, J., Clark, M., Zekkos, D., Roering, J., & Yanites, B. (2025, 09). Center for Land-Surface Hazards (CLaSH): What it is, what we’ve been doing, and opportunities for engagement with the SCEC community. Poster Presentation at 2025 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Community Capability Building (CCB)