Speaker/Affiliation: Amy East, U.S. Geological Survey
Title: Understanding physical landscape effects of climate change: how much do we know, and what are we doing about it?
When: Wednesday, January 14 12:00pm PST
Location: EMS B214
Abstract: Today, climate change is affecting virtually all terrestrial and nearshore settings. How well do we understand the physical landscape effects, and how have planning and economic sectors responded so far? This presentation will discuss the challenges of identifying and measuring climate-driven physical landscape responses to modern warming and its associated hydrologic shifts. Challenges include short, incomplete data records, land use and seismicity masking climatic effects, biases in data availability and resolution, and signal attenuation in sedimentary systems. Despite such challenges, the scientific community has important opportunities to learn from historical and paleo data, to select especially sensitive study sites, and to better characterize the extent and nuances of climate-change effects and to disentangle them from effects of land use or natural variability. Knowing that climate-driven sedimentary and geomorphic changes influence human health and safety, infrastructure, water–food–energy security, and economies, we will also look at examples of how those effects are being incorporated into planning and design today.
