Assessing Debris-flow Potential by Using Aviris Imagery to Map Surface Materials and Stratigraphy in Cataract Canyon, Utah

Debris flows are responsible for the loss of hundreds of lives and millions of dollars of property damage each year worldwide (Costa, 1987). As a result of extensive property damage and loss of life there is a pressing need to go beyond just describing the nature and extent of debris flows as they occur. Most of the research into debris-flow initiation has centered on rainfall, slope angle, and existing debris-flow deposits (Costa and Wieczorek, 1987). The factor of source lithology has been recently addressed by studies in the sedimentary terranes of Grand Canyon (Webb et al., 1997; Griffiths et al., 1996) and on the Colorado Plateau as a whole. On the Colorado Plateau shales dominated by kaolinite and illite clays are significantly more likely to be recent producers of debris-flows than are shales in which smectite clays dominate.