Katharine Huntington
University of Washington, WA·Earth & Environmental Science
Thousands of years ago, during colder climate periods, glacial ice and debris sometimes dammed rivers. When these dams burst, they released catastrophic floods far larger than any flood on Earth today.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
megafloods
catastrophic floods
glacial dam-burst floods
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Determine the source, depositional age and grain-size distribution of megaflood deposits along the Yarlung-Siang-Brahmaputra river system in the eastern Himalaya, using field observations and laboratory analytical tools.
- Develop a process-based numerical model that predicts how a bedrock river channel changes over more than a thousand years after a megaflood suddenly fills its valley with sediment (abrupt aggradation).
- Search for a topographic fingerprint unique to megafloods by comparing the shapes of eastern Himalayan river channels that have and have not experienced megaflooding.
More about the research
These megafloods left marks on landscapes on nearly every continent, and geologists read rare flood deposits to reconstruct how the floods shaped today's terrain. Most earlier work asked how megaflood discharges, more than a million cubic meters of water per second, carve bedrock river channels. This project asks a different question: what happens over thousands of years after a megaflood dumps huge volumes of sediment into a mountain river valley?
Why it matters
The results could help geologists interpret more accurately how landscapes on Earth and Mars formed. They may also change how sediment deposition is handled in computer models of eroding mountain landscapes. Because a dam failure is a human-caused version of the same process, the work could improve predictions of flood hazards after a dam breaks.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Marianne Karplus
University of Texas at El Paso, TX·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure ice thickness, subglacial sediments, and hydrologic processes in the Lunana glaciers of Bhutan using radar and seismic surveys.
Enrica Viparelli
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure how sedimentation rates and grain sizes vary across the Congaree National Park floodplain after the Hurricane Helene flood, using field sediment sampling.
Jonathan Czuba
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether fine sediment accumulation in streambeds can be predicted from bankfull flow conditions across a wide range of U.S. landscapes, by analyzing a U.S. EPA stream dataset.
The school
University of Washington: 81 labs on PI Pages, $1.7B a year on research, 694 research doctorates a year.
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