Kutí Project Looks at Landslide Monitoring, Mitigation & Education

Those scars remain on the landscape for decades, and so it's such a visible reminder every day of the impacts to human life and the impacts to our infrastructure and our livelihoods, our public health. And so it's front and center of people's minds right now. It continues to be in all of these communities. The human impact is immeasurable. It's always tough when we see a loss of life.

How does that affect the community? And not just on the human impact level, but The concerns for the community, the concerns for the ecosystem, all these ever-changing areas. It's a tough question and we're trying to figure that out because it's something we're mostly seeing within our time now, what we haven't seen in the past. One of the biggest projects that we have in partnership with Tlingit and Haida is our Hoot'eh project, which is addressing the increasing prevalence of atmospheric rivers, of extreme rainfall events throughout the region and the different impacts that that has on geohazards and how they impact communities across the region. And it's different for every community.

We have a group of staff at Tlingit and Haida that's going up to weather stations and putting up monitor equipment on possible areas of impact. And so we get to measure that and use it as not just a research aspect, but really find ways of trying to mitigate or educate. The mitigation part is going to be much more tough. We don't know how that will look. But it— getting that education will allow us to better educate the public as well.

Realizing that geohazards is a really broad range of things depending on what community you come from. Our water table at the Sitka Sound Science Center is a really neat educational tool that allows us to demonstrate within these communities and across communities how different geohazards play out in the different geologic settings across our region. Because again, not just the communities and the people are different, but the settings in which they are are so different. So increasing rainfall in Yakutat is going to cause very different changes than increasing rainfalls on Prince of Wales or in Sitka or in Hoonah. And so being able to show that physically with a water table and show how those changes look is a really powerful tool.

And we can take that tool to different communities and, and show them real time what that looks like. How does climate change impact that if we're to increase that water flow? It gives an idea and a model to see instead of having to live through it, which many of us are dealing with right now in Juneau on the Mendenhall River. This kind of model, I think, would allow us to find ways of mitigation efforts and a better education and outreach. I think people in Southeast Alaska are well aware that changing environment has these direct impacts.

We are not a region that is unfamiliar with rainfall, but wrapping your head around what more rainfall over shorter periods of time, these bigger, more extreme weather events can do, I think folks can start to wrap their heads around what that looks like. And it's really arming people with the tools to be able to adapt to what those changes are, whether they are landslides, whether it's changing sediment flow, whether it's flooding, or on the ocean, ocean acidification, warming, all of those pieces. The science is out there, the oral history, the knowledge, it's just putting it all together to think about how we can adapt in the future.