The National Science Foundation has awarded a team of researchers that includes Juneau scientists $990,437 to study glacial outburst flooding from Juneau’s Mendenhall Glacier.
A glacial outburst flood is caused when a glacial lake releases its water into a river. For the last two years in a row, such flooding has caused significant damage to homes in Juneau. The lake, called Suicide Basin, formed on the side of Mendenhall Glacier.
University of Alaska Southeast Geophysics Professor Jason Amundson said the research will focus on the basin, glacier and the flow of water into Mendenhall Lake. But he thinks the information they gather will help hydrologists understand the timing and flow of water down the Mendenhall River and into surrounding neighborhoods.
“There’s so much variability from one year to the next, and part of that is that it’s so hard to just observe the basin,” he said.
Studying the shape of the basin and how it changes could give them a better sense of how much water could be released each year, and potentially how quickly.
He said this work is going to take some time, so it may not help those who want to know what this year’s glacial outburst flood will look like.
Environmental Science Professor Eran Hood is the other UAS researcher on the team. He and Amundson have been studying the formation of Suicide Basin and its outburst flooding for years.
“Basically we have not had a lot of funding to work on the Mendenhall outburst flood, largely because, for a decade or so, it was never big enough that it created a serious hazard,” Hood said. “So there was no real sense of urgency in terms of people funding research on it.”
But now that the flood is causing extensive property damage in Juneau, he said it’s urgent that a larger team is committed to understanding it.
And that research could influence the formation of local policy.
“There are a lot of ideas being tossed around in terms of building levees or building walls along the river,” Hood said. “Well, any of those engineering solutions to mitigate the flood hazard will be helped by or informed by any numbers that we can come up with in terms of the potential future flood volumes.”
Hood said that even with the information they have now, it will be easier to predict if other communities near glaciers may see this type of flooding in the future.
“If we go back in time 30 years — now, and we have the same capacity to model then that we do now, we could have looked at the Suicide Basin there and said, ‘Hey, this is a place where a nice marginal lake is likely to form that could lead to outburst floods.’ Nobody did that,” Hood said. “And so we had no warning of it.”
The five-year grant will allow researchers to understand Suicide Basin’s formation more deeply, how its evolution will impact future glacial outburst events, and what indicators could forecast glacial outburst flooding in other communities.
Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Carnegie Mellon University will join the two UAS professors on this project, and the team plans to take on graduate and undergraduate students.
