Seminar - Weird dynamics of flood deposits in built environments

Speaker: Prof. Eli Lazarus - University of Southampton (UK) | Friday 28 March 2025 | 2,30 pm - Arduino Classroom

28.03.2025

Extreme geohazard events can change landscape morphology by redistributing huge volumes of sediment. Event-driven sediment deposition is typically studied in non-built (natural) settings – despite the ubiquity of occurrence and high economic cost of these geohazard impacts in built environments. Moreover, sedimentary consequences of extreme events in built settings tend to go unrecorded because they are rapidly cleared, at significant expense, from streets and roads to facilitate emergency response. Reducing disaster costs requires an ability to predict disaster impacts, which itself requires comprehensive measurement and study of the physical consequences of geohazard events. In this seminar I discuss systematic similarities and differences between flood-deposit morphology in built and non-built environments. Findings suggest that spatial characteristics of the built environment exerts a fundamental control on the form of large sedimentary deposits. Accounting for the influence of built fabric on the morphodynamics of flow-driven geohazards is a tractable step toward improved forecasts of hazard impacts and disaster risk reduction.

This seminar is supported by the “Shaping a World-Class University” initiative of the University of Padua, under the project “Geomorphic Feedbacks and Emergent Risk on Human-Altered Coasts” (Macro-Area of Intervention: Internationalization of the Curriculum, Project Category: Short-Term Visiting Professors).