June Slugs & Steins with Professor Noah Finnegan

Moving Mountains: Slow landslides in coastal California

During wet winters, like California just experienced, news stories abound about slow landslide damage to infrastructure from Crescent City to Palos Verdes. In this talk, I will provide an overview of what it is about California’s geology, tectonics, and climate that leads to this chronic and costly geohazard. Much of this understanding comes from 8 years of detailed monitoring of a large, slow landslide in the Diablo Range northeast of San Jose, CA.

Noah Finnegan is a professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UCSC specializing in “geomorphology,” the study of erosion and how it shapes topography. Noah teaches classes focused on geomorphology, active tectonics, and hydrology. Since starting at UCSC in 2009, Noah’s research has focused mainly on processes of erosion and sediment transport in rivers, and more recently, on the mechanics and hydrology of landslides. Before moving to California, Noah had always lived in locations in the U.S. that were covered by glaciers during the last ice age.