Giants in the Cascades

I sat down with a team of scientists who are using UPP Seed Grant funds to study what we might conceptualize as Tolkien-esque stone-giants engaged in an endless process of carving apart mountains and transforming large swaths of territory. Adam Booth, a PSU scientist on the team, would more correctly identify these giants as multi-mile-long landslides with transformative and sometimes destructive power. Adam is joined by Hank Johnson and Steve Gingerich from USGS in a collaborative effort to understand how surface water and groundwater interact with one another to control the speed of landslides.

Adam, Hank, and Steve will be presenting their research alongside the other UPP 2019 Seed Grant recipients at the UPP Symposium currently scheduled for the 1st week of May, so I won’t spoil the details of their discoveries here. The short of it is that Adam, Hank, and Steve want to understand whether surface water runoff in streams and gullies drains or recharges groundwater in slow-moving landslides. If surface water runoff drains groundwater, then it contributes to the stabilization of landslides. If surface water introduces more groundwater, then it contributes to the destabilization and acceleration of landslides. The scientists hope that better understanding the mechanisms behind landslides will contribute to improved modeling that will aid community managers. Plus, studying giant glacier-like streams of rock and soil is pretty cool.

But I was interested in something even more powerful than stone-giants… the power of teamwork, friendship, and cross-institution collaboration. How is it that an unlikely trio composed of a hillslope geomorphologist (Adam), a geochemist (Hank), and groundwater hydrologist (Steve) might find themselves working together to overcome wildfires, a global pandemic, and data-privacy laws? The answer: a collaborative research community and a little bit of chedda provided by the UPP Seed Grant Program. 

Science requires money, and scientists and their equipment aren’t cheap. So without the help of the 2019 UPP Seed Grant, the intrepid team wouldn’t have ventured into the Cascadia wilderness. Each year the UPP Seed Grant program supports joint research between PSU and USGS staff by providing research funding and, as of the most recent round of funding, a graduate student tuition remission. The 2023 seed grant program will be accepting proposals in summer 2022, so keep your eyes peeled. Back in 2019, Adam saw UPP’s request for proposals and reached out to Hank and Steve in what would become a years-long collaborative fellowship. 

Pursuing this research has built ties between Adam, Hank, Steve, and the broader UPP community. Hank and Steve agree that the project has been a great opportunity to network with PSU faculty and staff while learning about the different research programs of their coworkers at USGS. The trio hopes that the increased familiarity will make future collaboration easier and more common.

The team’s journey into the Cascades was eventful. Set to embark in the summer of 2020, the researchers were delayed by wildfires that ravaged the Detroit lake area and a global pandemic that kept folks indoors. When the smoke settled, Hank, Adam, and Steve led a caravan of six cars into the mountains, which allowed them to abide social distancing guidelines. 

Some challenges arose closer to home for the researchers. The landslide in question is owned by a private company, which means any data collected is under the private company’s control. However, as USGS employees, any data produced by Hank or Steve must be made public. The team found a workaround when the lumber company agreed to provide their own hydrologists, allowing Hank and Steve to maintain an advisory role. After two trips into the mountain, the team headed back to the Shire to rest and analyze their data.

With their publication set to release in February of 2022, the team now have their eyes on other projects. Steve is excited to launch his model of groundwater flow in the Harney Basin after many years of preparation. Hank is excited to analyze five years of data collected in the Umatilla region and the Walla Walla Basin. Adam is excited to dive into data collected during his fellowship in Iceland looking at bedrock landslides. All are true scientists at heart, excited by the opportunity to finally dig into their datasets.