A geomorphologist

Richard Iverson is a geomorphologist focusing mainly on debris flows, landslides, and volcanology. A lot of the work he has done over his career has pertained to landslides and debris flows. He has accrued over 14000 citations on his papers over his career thus far, with 6000 of them coming over the past 5 years.The two papers that I chose to read were about the impact of soil porosity on landslides, and debris-flow mobilization from landslides. I chose to read his articles because these topics are of interest to me. I've never learned about them in depth, so I decided I would start here.

Fun fact: I tried to read a paper of his that was on the physics of debris flows. It did not go well.

The first paper discussed the impact that the initial porosity of a soil had on landslides. They found that only a slight change in porosity could drastically impact the speed of a landslide. Even a small change in porosity changed the landslide speed from .002 meters per second to 1 meter per second.

While there is a lot of math that I don't particularly understand in this paper, it essentially talks about the correlation between pore pressure and debris flow mobilization. Ground water, snow melt, or other kinds of water sources can increase the likelihood of a debris flow through saturation of the soil pores.