Mountains in motion: how climate change is rewriting hazards in Earth’s icy regions

The seminar will shed light on how climate change is affecting high-mountain environments, based on Dan’s globally-leading research on the topic. Among the events that Dan will talk about is this year’s devastating floods in Nepal, and he is leading a large international team who have been reconstructing the causes of that event.

Mountains in motion: how climate change is rewriting hazards in Earth’s icy regions

As climate change enhances glacier loss and leads to permafrost degradation, already dynamic mountain landscapes are becoming even more so, leading to hazardous processes. Recent disasters in the Himalaya, including at Rasuwa in August 2026, have shown how complicated and far-reaching these can be, thwarting efforts to mitigate their risks. At 8:37 am on 26 August 2026, a ~110x106 cubic meter rock-ice avalanche collapsed from a steep permafrost slope in a remote valley in the Langtang region of Nepal. The ensuing hyperconcentrated flow was extremely large and destructive, leaving >7,000 either dead or missing. Was this event abnormal? How is it different from what happened in Chamoli in 2021? Or Sikkim in 2023? Or Tracy Arm in 2025? Or Vallunaraju in 2025? In this talk, we will explore several recent hazards cascades and investigate their similarities and differences in an effort to understand whether early warning is possible. I can’t promise any answers, but I endeavour to provide a thought-provoking discussion.

Speaker: Dr Dan Shugar, Director of the waterSHED Lab; Associate Professor in the Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment; Director of the Environmental Science Program, University of Calgary. https://profiles.ucalgary.ca/daniel-shugar (https://profiles.ucalgary.ca/daniel-shugar)

Dr. Shugar is a global leader in the field of alpine geohazards – those catastrophic geologic events that occur in the world’s high mountains and are increasingly linked to climate change. He has worked on mountain hazards and disasters in the Himalaya, including the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake, 2021 Chamoli, 2023 Sikkim, and 2026 Rasuwa landslides and floods, and in North America, including the 2025 Alaskan megatsunami, and makes considerable effort to communicate science to general audiences through talks, media interviews, documentaries, and podcasts. He is Associate Professor at the University of Calgary where he leads the Water, Sediment, Hazards, and Earth-surface Dynamics (waterSHED) Lab, and is Director of the Environmental Science Program.

Description supplied by the event organiser.