£1m project aims to forecast long-term effects of debris transported by natural disasters

Landslides, avalanches and glacial floods can have an immediate and devastating effect on anything in their path.

However, a £1million research project is now going to explore their potential to impact communities often located hundreds of kilometres away and many years after an event has originally taken place.

Centred on the headwaters of the Ganges River in the Himalayas, the SUPERSLUG initiative is named after the huge masses of debris created by such natural disasters, sometimes described as sediment slugs when they travel down rivers.

Using a range of novel monitoring technologies and sensors, scientists will develop and test numerical models to provide the most comprehensive predictions yet of where, when and how the long-term impacts of recent and future extreme events might be felt.

The three-year project is being supported with a grant of almost £840,000 from the Natural Environment Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation.

Led by researchers from the University of Plymouth, with colleagues from the universities of Exeter, Hull, Leeds, Newcastle and Staffordshire, the project will also harness the expertise of academics at the University of Calgary, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee and the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology.