Event

The Department of Earth & Environmental Science

University of Pennsylvania

Invites you to attend a EES Seminar Series

Friday, September 20, 2024 - 3:00 PM

"The February 7th, 2021, Chamoli Disaster: A(nother) Recent Example of the Complex Interactions of Cascading Hazards, Mountain Development, Renewable Energy, and Climate Change"

On 7 Feb 2021, a catastrophic mass flow moved through multiple valleys in Chamoli, Uttarakhand, India, causing widespread devastation and severely damaging two hydropower projects. Over 200 people were killed or remain missing. Scientists and other experts, near globally, attributed the event to an outburst from a glacial lake. This (mis)information spread rapidly through media outlets globally. In parallel, an international collaboration focused on studying this event and its impacts, organically developed. We closely inspected the flood path, which quickly led to the realization that the source for this mass flow was not a lake and was not at all obvious. In this talk, I will provide a brief history of nuclear spy devices, the Chipko (tree-hugging) Movement, women activists, and hydropower plant safety in the region – surprisingly important context for understanding this disaster. I will then discuss the untangling of evidence from eye-witness videos, seismic analysis, remote sensing analysis, and modeling we used to determine the source and evolution of the mass movement. Finally, I will briefly discuss the Chamoli flood as one of many disasters at the center of the complex interplay between development, climate change, and hazards in the Himalayas as well as other mountainous regions of the world.

Dr. Summer Rupper

Professor

School of Environment, Society, and Sustainability

Associate Director of the Global Change and Sustainability Center

University of Utah

Summer Rupper received her Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Washington, Seattle, and is currently professor in the School of Environment, Society, and Sustainability and associate director of the Global Change and Sustainability Center at the University of Utah. Her research is part of a larger effort to characterize climate variability and change, and the impacts of these on society. Her group currently focuses on quantifying glacier contributions to water resources, hazards, and sea-level rise; assessing glacier sensitivity to climate change; and reconstructing past climate using ice cores and geomorphic evidence of past glacier extents. She has received several awards for her research, has served as member and lead of NASA science teams, and is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences' Frontiers of Science.