John J. Clague

Simon Fraser University · Department of Earth Sciences

Many glaciers dam lakes at their margins that can drain suddenly. Due to downwasting of these glacier dams, the magnitude of glacier lake outburst floods may change. Judging from repeat satellite observations, most ice-dammed lakes with repeated outbursts have decreased in area, volume, and flood size. Yet, we find that some lakes oppose this trend...

Wetlands, essential for Earth’s health, ecological balance, and local economies, require accurate monitoring and assessment for effective conservation. Data-driven models based on remote sensing are highly capable of monitoring the status and classification of wetlands. This study developed a semi-supervised framework for mapping wetland covers in...

The global retreat of glaciers is dramatically altering mountain and high-latitude landscapes, with new ecosystems developing from apparently barren substrates1–4. The study of these emerging ecosystems is critical to understanding how climate change interacts with microhabitat and biotic communities and determines the future of ice-free terrains1,...

The Fraser River Delta (FRD) is a large sedimentary system and home to Metro Vancouver, situated within the unceded territories of several First Nations. This review provides an overview of the geological evolution of the FRD, connecting hydrodynamic processes with sedimentary deposits across its diverse environments, from the river to the delta sl...

Geotechnical drilling for a tunnel between Port Moody and Burnaby, BC, Canada, uncovered a buried fjord. Its sedimentary fill has a thickness of at least 130 m and extends more than 37 m below present mean sea level. Recovered sediments record cyclical growth and decay of successive Cordilleran ice sheets. The oldest sediments comprise 58 m of almo...

Mount Meager is a deeply eroded quaternary volcanic complex located in southwestern British Columbia (BC) and is known for its frequent large landslides. In 2010, the south face of Mount Meager collapsed, generating a long-runout debris avalanche that was one of the largest landslides (50 × 10⁶ m³) in Canadian history. Over the past 14 years, the l...

Beijing, China’s capital city, has experienced decades of severe land subsidence due to the long-term overexploitation of groundwater. The implementation of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project (SNWDP) and artificial ecological restoration have significantly changed Beijing’s hydro-ecological and geological environment in recent years, leadin...

The development of terrestrial ecosystems depends greatly on plant mutualists such as mycorrhizal fungi. The global retreat of glaciers exposes nutrient‐poor substrates in extreme environments and provides a unique opportunity to study early successions of mycorrhizal fungi by assessing their dynamics and drivers. We combined environmental DNA meta...

La caída de rocas en zonas montañosas es un fenómeno geomorfológico impredecible y representa una amenaza a elementos naturales y antrópicos del paisaje. Este trabajo se desarrolló en el parque provincial de Stawamus Chief en la Columbia Británica, Canadá. El objetivo de la investigación fue evaluar la frecuencia de la caída de rocas mediante la ap...

The mechanisms underlying plant succession remain highly debated. Due to the local scope of most studies, we lack a global quantification of the relative importance of species addition ‘versus’ replacement. We assessed the role of these processes in the variation (β-diversity) of plant communities colonizing the forelands of 46 retreating glaciers...

Large stratovolcanoes in the Cascade Range have high equilibrium-line altitudes that support glaciers whose Holocene and latest Pleistocene advances are amenable to dating. Glacier advances produced datable stratigraphic sequences in lateral moraines, which complement dating of end moraines. New mapping of glacial deposits on Mount Rainier using LI...

The characterization of landslides located in remote areas poses significant challenges due to the costs of reaching the sites and the lack of reliable subsurface data to constrain geological interpretations. In this paper, the advantages of combining field and remote sensing techniques to investigate the deformation and stability of rock slopes ar...

The worldwide retreat of glaciers is causing a faster than ever increase in ice‐free areas that are leading to the emergence of new ecosystems. Understanding the dynamics of these environments is critical to predicting the consequences of climate change on mountains and at high latitudes. Climatic differences between regions of the world could modu...

Hillslopes are important elements of mountain landscapes, but there is still limited understanding of how hillslopes respond to river incision and rock mass properties at the landscape scale. Topographic characteristics at Qingyang Mountain (QYM) on the tectonically active northeastern Tibetan Plateau, which we documented using field observations a...

The most recent deglaciation of the North American Ice Sheet Complex (NAISC: comprising the Innuitian, Cordilleran, and Laurentide ice sheets) offers a broad perspective from which to analyze the timing and rate of ice retreat, deglacial sea-level rise, and abrupt climate change events. Previous efforts to portray the retreat of the NAISC have been...

Debate about relations between rates of fluvial incision and time (the “Sadler effect”) continues, impeding the use of incision rates to infer tectonic and climatic processes. There is a dearth of detailed field evidence that can be used to explore the coupling between tectonics and climate in controlling alluvial channel geometry and incision rate...

La laguna de Agnia ocupa un bajo endorreico ubicado en el Chubut extraandino, que presenta una serie de cordones litorales en su margen oriental, correlacionables a estabilizaciones del lago durante el Pleistoceno y el Holoceno. Debido a la excelente conservación de su morfología y a los depósitos sedimentarios asociados a su evolución en el pasado...

The Muskingum model is one of the most widely used hydrological methods in flood routing, and calibrating its parameters is an ongoing research challenge. We optimized Muskingum model parameters to accurately simulate hourly output hydrographs of three flood-prone rivers in the Karun watershed, Iran. We evaluated model performance using the correla...

The Fraser River Delta (FRD) is a major sedimentary system and is home to one of Canada’s largest metropolitan areas, Metro Vancouver. It is also an ecologically important region that is culturally significant to several First Nations groups. In this review, we summarize the state of knowledge about the geological evolution of the FRD and link hydr...

Floods are both complex and destructive, and in most parts of the world cause injury, death, loss of agricultural land, and social disruption. Flood susceptibility (FS) maps are used by land‐use managers and land owners to identify areas that are at risk from flooding and to plan accordingly. This study uses machine learning ensembles to produce ob...

The current limited approaches to calculating hillslope erosion rate hamper the study of the relationships among the rates of hillslope erosion, river incision, and tectonic uplift and hence the discussion of steady-state landscape evolution. In this paper, we use remote sensing and geochronological methods to calculate the upper and lower bounding...

Episodic failures of ice-dammed lakes have produced some of the largest floods in history, with disastrous consequences for communities in high mountains1–7. Yet, estimating changes in the activity of ice-dam failures through time remains controversial because of inconsistent regional flood databases. Here, by collating 1,569 ice-dam failures in si...

Protection against natural hazards (i.e., floods, landslides, forest fires, and earthquakes) is vital in land-use planning, especially in high-risk areas. Multi-hazard susceptibility maps can be used by land-use manager to guide urban development, to minimize the risk of natural disasters. The objective of the present study was to use four machine...

Documenting habitats of rangeland plant species is required to properly manage rangelands and to understand ecosystem processes. A reliable rangeland species potential map can help managers and policy makers design a sustainable grazing system on rangelands. The aim of this study is to map the plant species in the Qurveh City rangelands, Kurdistan...

Mechanisms underlying plant succession remain highly debated. A global quantification of the relative importance of species addition versus replacement is lacking due to the local scope of most studies. We quantified their role in the variation of plant communities colonizing the forelands of 46 retreating glaciers distributed worldwide, using both...

Global atmospheric warming is causing physical and biotic changes in Earth’s high mountains at a rate that is likely unprecedented in the Holocene. We summarize changes in the presently glacierized mountains of northwest North America, including a rapid and large reduction in glacier ice and permafrost, a related increase in slope instability and l...

We analyze the sensitivity of a large (area extent ∼3 km²), deep-seated gravitational slope deformation (Fels slide, Alaska Range) to three specific drivers: (i) liquid surface water input from ERA-5 reanalysis snow melt and rainfall; (ii) locally projected seismic activity of Alaskan earthquakes; and (iii) lowering of Fels Glacier at the slide toe...

No abstract for this introductory article.

Soil erosion is a major cause of damage to agricultural lands in many parts of the world and is of particular concern in semiarid parts of Iran. We use five machine learning techniques—Random Forest (RF), M5P, Reduced Error Pruning Tree (REPTree), Gaussian Processes (GP), and Pace Regression (PR)—under two scenarios to predict soil erodibility in t...

Land reclamation in the Yan'an New District (YND) on the Chinese Loess Plateau is one of the largest earthworks projects in the world, involving the excavation of loess from ridges and the deposition of the material in adjacent valleys, flattening an area of more than 78 km². It can take multiple years for the landscape to adjust to the new topogra...

Protection against natural hazards is vital in land-use planning, especially in high-risk areas. Multi-hazard susceptibility maps can be used by land-use manager to guide urban development, so as to minimize the risk of natural disasters. The objective of the present study was to use five machines based on learning methods to produce multi-hazard s...

Soil water erosion (SWE) is an important global hazard that affects food availability through soil degradation, a reduction in crop yield, and agricultural land abandonment. A map of soil erosion susceptiblity is a first and vital step in land management and soil conservation. Several machine learning (ML) algorithms optimized using the Grey Wolf O...

Landslides are major threats to the construction and operation of electric towers of the Sichuan–Tibet Grid Interconnection Project (STGIP). The long, narrow project corridor is vulnerable to different types of landslides, making risk management a difficult task. In this study, a kinematic-based, landslide risk management framework that includes ha...

There is disagreement in the Quaternary research community in how much of the marine δ¹⁸O signal is driven by change in ice volume. Here, we examine this topic by bringing together empirical and modelling work for Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS 3; 57 ka to 29 ka), a time when the marine δ¹⁸O record indicates moderate continental glaciation and a globa...

We describe and model the evolution of a recent landslide, tsunami, outburst flood and sediment plume in the southern Coast Mountains, British Columbia, Canada. On 28 November 2020, about 18 million m3 of rock descended 1000 m from a steep valley wall and traveled across the toe of a glacier before entering a 0.6 km2 glacier lake and producing >100...

The Chinese government has implemented measures to reduce poverty in the country. Specifically, the Targeted Poverty Alleviation (2013–2020) policy is a set of unique, large-scale and precise poverty control measures undertaken by China in an effort to eliminate absolute poverty. Deeply impoverished areas in the mountainous regions of Southwest Chi...

In this work, a simple methodology for preliminarily assessing the magnitude of potential landslide-induced impulse waves’ attenuation in mountain lakes is presented. A set of metrics is used to define the geometries of theoretical mountain lakes of different sizes and shapes and to simulate impulse waves in them using the hydrodynamic software Flo...

Combined use of radiocarbon-dated subfossil wood within lateral moraines and surface exposure ages on moraine boulders provides an approach to better constrain times of glacier advance and onset of retreat. We test this method at Gilbert Glacier in the southern Coast Mountains of British Columbia where units of sediments associated with glacier exp...

Evidence of at least three, Early to Middle Pleistocene glaciations is recorded in the stratigraphic exposures near the outer limit of glaciation in southern Patagonia. At Cabo Vírgenes, at the mouth of the Strait of Magellan, up to 70 m of till, gravel, sand, and stony silt were deposited in a grounding-line environment at the front of the Magella...

Unusual channel-amphitheatre landforms are present in Late Pleistocene–early Holocene, subaqueous fan and delta deposits in the glacial Lake Fraser basin, central British Columbia. The lake formed during the decay of the last Cordilleran Ice Sheet and drained ~11,500 years ago during a large outburst flood. The fronts of a delta and two subaqueous...

Glacial lake sediments exposed at two sites in Skagit Valley, Washington, encase abundant macrofossils dating from 27.7 to 19.8 cal ka BP. At the last glacial maximum (LGM) most of the valley floor was part of a regionally extensive arid boreal (subalpine) forest that periodically included montane and temperate trees and open boreal species such as...

Most of the world’s mountain glaciers have been retreating for more than a century in response to climate change. Glacier retreat is evident on all continents, and the rate of retreat has accelerated during recent decades. Accurate, spatially explicit information on the position of glacier margins over time is useful for analyzing patterns of glaci...

With the growth of cities, urban flooding has increasingly become an issue for regional and national governments. The destructive effects of floods are magnified in cities. Accurate models of urban flood susceptibility are required to mitigate this hazard mitigation and build resilience in cities. In this paper, we evaluate flood riskin Jiroft city...

We present a workflow for investigating large, slow-moving landslides which combines the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technique, GIS post-processing, and airborne laser scanning (ALS), and apply it to Fels landslide in Alaska, US. First, we exploit a speckle tracking (ST) approach to derive the easting, northing, and vertical components of the di...

We used three state-of-the-art machine learning techniques (boosted regression tree, random forest, and support vector machine) to produce a multi-hazard (MHR) map illustrating areas susceptible to flooding, gully erosion, forest fires, and earthquakes in Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province, Iran. The earthquake hazard map was derived from a probab...

Predicting the spatial impact of debris flows on fans is challenging due to complex runout behaviour. Debris flow mobility is highly variable and flows can sporadically avulse the channel. For hazard and risk assessments, practitioners typically base the probability of spatial impact or avulsion on their experience and expert judgment. To support d...

The relationship between landslides and rock mass strength is fundamental for assessing landslide hazards. Some researchers have proposed that there is an inverse relationship between the number of landslides and rock mass strength. However, in some tectonically active mountain ranges, higher rates of landsliding appear to be associated with greate...

A deadly cascade A catastrophic landslide in Uttarakhand state in India on February 2021 damaged two hydropower plants, and more than 200 people were killed or are missing. Shugar et al. describe the cascade of events that led to this disaster. A massive rock and ice avalanche roared down a Himalayan valley, turning into a deadly debris flow upstre...

We use results of satellite-based interferometric synthetic aperture radar, Global Positioning System, and borehole inclinometer data to constrain numerical models that improve understanding of slope deformation at the Alexandria landslide, British Columbia, Canada. Surface monitoring data and borehole slope inclinometer measurements provide import...

Recent technological developments including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, terrestrial laser scanning, photogrammetry and point cloud analysis software tools greatly enhance our ability to investigate the relationship between faulting and the spatial geometrical and mechanical characteristics of a rock mass controlled by faulting. Using the Yarlung Tsan...

This study attempted to predict ground subsidence occurrence using statistical and machine learning models, specifically the evidential belief function (EBF), index of entropy (IoE), support vector machine (SVM), and random forest (RF) models in the Rafsanjan Plain in southern Iran to investigate 11 possible causative factors: slope percent, aspect...

Earth's climate is warming and will continue to warm as the century progresses. High mountains and high latitudes are experiencing the greatest warming of all regions on Earth and also are some of the most sensitive areas to climate change, in part because ecosystems and natural processes in these areas are intimately linked to the cryosphere. Evid...

High resolution topographic modeling has become more accessible due to the development of Structure from Motion (SfM) image matching algorithms in digital photogrammetry. Large archival databases of historical aerial photographs are available in university, public, and government libraries, commonly as paper copies. The photos can be in poor condit...

Laguna de Agnia is located within an endorheic basin in arid extra-Andean Patagonia. A variety of erosional and depositional landforms, most of which are relict, are well preserved in the basin. Geological, geomorphological, and sedimentological studies, ¹⁴C and ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar ages, and paleomagnetic data allow us to modify the published interpretation...