Pahoehoe lava flows are common in every basaltic province, and their submarine variants, pillow lavas and sheet flows, cover the bulk of the Earth. Pahoehoe flows are emplaced by inflation—the injection of molten lava underneath a solidified crust. Only in the past few years has an understanding of the inflation process and the ability to recognize ancient inflated lava flows been achieved. All...

Flood defence maintenance strategies require understanding of the time-dependent behaviour of flood defences. Quantitative risk and reliability methods provide a rational decision-making basis for flood defence management. Failure mechanisms influencing the flood defence reliability are expressed by a limit state equation and organised in a fault tree. One or more random variables in the limit ...

Ice cauldrons are depressions which form at the surface of ice sheets when an underlying subglacial lake empties. Notable examples of such cauldrons occur on the surface of the Vatnajökull ice cap in Iceland, and in particular are formed when subglacial volcanic eruptions occur. More generally, cauldrons will form when a subglacial lake empties during a jökulhlaup. The rate of subsidence of the...

[1] The largest glacier outburst flood (jökulhlaup) ever recorded in Iceland occurred in 1996 and came from subglacial lake Grı́msvötn in Vatnajökull ice cap. Among other noteworthy features, this flood was characterized by an unprecedentedly high lake level prior to flood initiation, extremely rapid linear rise in lake discharge, delay between the onset of lake drainage and floodwater arrival a...

Discharge and water temperature measurements in the Skaftá river and measurements of the lowering of the ice over the subglacial lake at the western Skaftá cauldron, Vatnajökull, Iceland, were made during a rapidly rising glacial outburst flood (jökulhlaup) in September 2006. Outflow from the lake, flood discharge at the glacier terminus and the transient subglacial volume of floodwater during ...

Recently, there has been great interest in developing finely pixellated position-sensitive scintillation detectors for ultra-high-resolution Positron Emission Tomography (PET) systems designed for breast cancer detection, diagnosis, and staging and for imaging small laboratory animals. We are developing a different high-resolution PET detector design that promotes nearly complete scintillation ...

Future coastal flood risk will be strongly influenced by sea-level rise (SLR) and changes in the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones. These two factors are generally considered independently. Here, we assess twenty-first century changes in the coastal hazard for the US East Coast using a flood index (FI) that accounts for changes in flood duration and magnitude driven by SLR and change...

The flood hazard in New York City depends on both storm surges and rising sea levels. We combine modeled storm surges with probabilistic sea-level rise projections to assess future coastal inundation in New York City from the preindustrial era through 2300 CE. The storm surges are derived from large sets of synthetic tropical cyclones, downscaled from RCP8.5 simulations from three CMIP5 models....

Sea-level rise due to both climate change and non-climatic factors threatens coastal settlements, infrastructure and ecosystems. Projections of mean global sea level (GSL) rise provide insufficient information to plan adaptive responses; local decisions require local projections that accommodate different risk tolerances and time frames and that can be linked to storm surge projections. Here we...

We used an annual time series (August 2004 until August 2005) of ENVISAT-ASAR data, supported by two ASTER scenes to investigate ice dam fluctuations and changes of the surface area of the marginal lake Grænalón. The lake occupies a lateral valley, dammed by the westernmost flow band of Skeiðarárjökull, one of the largest outlets of Vatnajökull ice cap. During the period of investigation Skeiða...