May 04, 2026: Georg convened quite a crowded session, featuring 9 talks and 12 posters, on Glacial Lake Outburst Floods at this year's general assembly of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria.

April 28, 2026: Natalie defended her PhD thesis, in which she investigated recent dynamics of ice-dammed lakes in Alaska. Congratulations, Natalie!

April 1st, 2026: Lisa returned from the United States Geological Survey to investigate landslide hazards and teach in the Geocology BSc & MSc program

March 2026: After a long wait, we have moved to House 32 on Campus Golm—come find us on the ground floor.

February 3, 2026: Oliver gave a keynote lecture on climate trends, anomalies, and large landslides in Christchurch, New Zealand.

January 30, 2026: Georg discussed the results of a recent study, published in Nature Water, on the global volume, lifetime, and resource potential of glacial lakes in a radio interview with Deutschlandfunk.

Nov 28, 2025: Are you interested in doing research on large landslides, climate trends, and anomalies? We are happy to offer a DFG-funded PhD position. The project will last for three years and start in the spring of 2026. Apply now!

Sep 26, 2025: Maria and Oliver uncover why seemingly ordinary rainstorms can trigger devastating hillslope–torrential cascades in tropical mountains — with implications for managing such hazard cascades worldwide.

Sep 18, 2025: Wolfgang explained how geomorphic and glacial extreme events and earthquakes put hydropower infrastructure at risk, harming local workers and communities, while threatening the green energy potential for national economies.

April 02, 2025: In an interview with Tibet News, Wolfgang raised concerns about building large hydropower dams in tectonically active mountain regions.

Mar 28, 2025: Wolfgang and Will organised a workshop to explore the community needs for safeguaring the development of TopoToolbox under FAIR principles.

Mar 12, 2025: Natalie published a paper that explains why outbursts from ice-dammed lake Desolation Lake became larger while the ice-dam thinned.

Mar 24, 2025: Welcome, Hua and Shihao! Hua works on Antarctic submarine canyons. Shihao's research addresses landslides, earthquakes and infrastructure.

Mar 17, 2025: Oliver and Edier Aristizábal, a former guest scientist in our group, identified controls on the state of landscape transience.

Mar 05, 2025: The UP media office has written a report about our excursion to Alaska and the film about it in May 2023.

Feb 18, 2025: Joaquin Vicente Ferrer defended his doctoral thesis, in which he explored the global exposure to large landslides. Congratulations, Joaquin!

Feb 18, 2025: Our team effort—including many undergraduate students—revealed that growing glacier lakes have not resulted in larger GLOFs.

Feb 01, 2025: We welcome Dr. Wolfgang Schwanghart in our team. He will work on geomorphic problems related to hydropower production and geomorphometry.

Oct 11, 2024: Georg received the PostDoc prize from the DGGM for his research on glacier lake outburst floods in the past five years.

08 Oct, 2024: Joaquin's research on slow-moving landslide exposure makes it to the Top 10 in the 2024 Allianz Climate Risk Award.

Sep 17, 2024: Joaquin publishes his work on slow-moving landslide exposure and their drivers across IPCC regions in Earth's Future.

May 21, 2024: Georg and Natalie contributed to an international effort to summarise the current state of knowledge on glacier lakes and GLOFs.

Mar 28, 2024: Christian and colleagues from the RETROGRESS project lay out core research themes to study within the coastal rainforest of Pumalín (Chile).

January and February, 2024: Natalie attended a field school on glaciology and glacier processes on Svalbard during the Arctic winter.

Oct 27, 2023: Oliver, Lisa and Joaquin presented their research on landslides in a changing world to a delegation from the Republic of Turkey

Oct 18, 2023: Lisa and Oliver showed that a small number of landslides from only 5 rainstorms can help learn useful models for early landslide warning.

September, 2023: Chris and Georg taught undergraduate field classes on physical geography and geomorphology.

July 12, 2023: Natalie published the results of her Master's thesis, for which she had compiled thousands of GLOFs in an unprecedented literature review.

June 22, 2023: Lisa defended her dissertation, in which she explored the conditions and possibilities for predicting rainfall-triggered landslides.

June 05-09, 2023: With two talks and a poster, we made a great contribution to the state-of-the-art in outburst research.

May 22 - June 01, 2023: Natalie, Georg, and Oliver studied glaciers, deltas, and the depth of Lituya Bay, Alaska, which is repeatedly hit by GLOFs.

Apr 23, 2023: Mass loss of the glaciers in the Himalayas is higher than previously assumed because the meltwater trapped in lakes has been neglected so far

Feb 15, 2023: Smaller, earlier, higher: Several members of our group worked on quantifying long-term changes in ice-dammed lakes.

Jan 11, 2023: Melanie used numerical models to generate flooding scenarios for Pokhara ranging from meterological to cataclysmic lake outburst floods.

Jan 26, 2023: Lisa co-authored a study showing that erosion rates are synchronous with 400-kyr Milankovitch cycles in the southern Central Andes.

Jan 20, 2023: Maurico successfully defended his PhD thesis on inversion strategies for electrical resistivity data. Congratulations!

Nov 27, 2022: Natalie's poster on "Global trends and patterns of glacier lake outburst floods since 1900" convinced the jury. Congratulations!

Oct 05, 2022: Click here to see Lisa Luna's invited talk on incomplete landslide inventories at the Landaware workshop in Birmensdorf, Switzerland.

Click here for more details on our proposed session on short- and long-term dynamics of vegetated landscapes, co-convened by Christian Mohr.

Nov 24-27, 2022: Natalie, Joaquin, and Georg will present their ongoing work on large landslides and global and local outbursts of glacier lakes.

Oct 2022: We teach a variety of classes on natural hazards, geomorphology, environmental statistics, programming, and GIS. Check out the full list here.

Oct 21, 2022: Melanie successfully defended her PhD thesis on regional susceptibility and local hazard from glacier lake outbursts. Congratulations!

25 September 2022: Melanie and Oliver used hydrodynamic models and high-resolution satellite images to detect the zones of highest flood hazard in Pokhara

Sep 11-24, 2022: Natalie, Oliver, and Georg investigated the role of landslides, rock avalanches, glacier lakes, and outburst floods in a warming climate.

Sep 21, 2022: Lisa found that landslides in the PNW are most likely to occur in January to February, lagging behind winter rainfall by 1-2 months.

15 August 2022: Using convolutional neural networks, Elli and Oliver detected thousands of squarekilometers of landslide terrain in Patagonia.

August 2022: Lisa and Georg will present their latest research on rainfall thresholds for landslides in cities and ice-dam failures in high mountains.

August 2022: Natalie has joined the REACT project to investigate glacier-related hazards in NW North America.

01 August 2022: Sten joined RETROGRESS to investigate the influence of wind and soil organic carbon on landsliding in the Coastal Rainforests of Patagonia.

July 2022: Joaquin met international experts to discuss the interaction between infrastructure and large landslides in Italy and Austria.

14 June 2022: Elli successfully defended her PhD thesis on giant landslides in Patagonia, Argentina. Congratulations, Elli!

01 April 2022: Maria joined us within the BB-KI Chips project, in which she will combine AI and physics-based models for natural hazard assessment.

04 March 2022: We will soon have a new PhD candiate focusing on glacier-related hazards in the NW Pacific Coastal Mountains

28 Feb 2022: Our new study shows that the occurrence of reported GLOFs could be strongly underestimated in the early 20th century.

12 Dec 2021: We offer a 3-year PhD position on landsliding by biomass surcharge and wind disturbance in Patagonian rainforests. Interested? Click here!

18 - 25 Nov 2021: Olli and Georg had fruitful discussions with John Clague and Marten Geertsema about establishing joint projects on mountain hazards.

04 Nov 2021: Our group member Elli was awarded for her poster "Detect Giant Landslides with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)". Congratulations!

21 Oct 2021: Christian's paper on the signature of earthquakes in tree rings has been featured by Science and EOS.

25 Oct 2021: Click here to see an overview of our classes that we offer this semester, including brand-new classes in the CLEWS master's program.

Sep 25, 2021: Using isotopic and wood anatomic proxies, Christian's new study quantifies the impacts of earthquakes on soil water and tree growth.

On 01 Oct 2021, Joaquin Ferrer joined our research group. Joaquin will work on predicting large landslides from complex network. Welcome!

August / September 2021: Christian and Georg taught field classes for geoecologists and geographers in the Bachelor's program.

July 12, 2021: Melanie published a study that explores the susceptibility of Himalayan glacier lakes to sudden outbursts.

23-26th April 2021: our group members Melanie, Elisabeth, and Georg will present their progress on flood modelling, landslide detection, and GLOF hazard.

Oliver wrote a graduate level textbook that helps understand landscape change for disaster mitigation.

March 2021: Our group member Lisa won the prize for an excellent poster at the 2020 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Feb 11, 2021: Lisa Luna and Elisabeth Schönfeldt will be presenting their research on landslides at the University of Potsdam's #WomenInScience event"

Our working group contributed to a paper in Earth’s Future about cascading hazards after the Australian fire season 2019/20.

Melanie tests the effects of elevation, lake area and its rate of change, glacier-mass balance and monsoonality on sudden glacier lake outburst floods.

Sep 29: Elli convinced the committee with her talk "Giant slope failures as breeding grounds for earthflows in the Patagonian Andean foreland". Congrats!

Sep 07, 2020: Oliver published an article that introduces Bayesian methods to scientists concerned with Earth surface processes and landforms.

Elisabeth and Oliver were involved in mapping, dating, and interpreting giant low-gradient landslides in glacial deposits around Lago Pueyrredón.

Oliver was involved in a study that investigated whether hillslopes become more or less prone for landslides after years of monitoring.

In her first PhD paper, Elisabeth analysed the role of water in triggering large earthflows in Patagonia during the late Holocene.

Oliver and Julia wrote a review article on the geomorphology of tropical mountain rivers, and their changes through the Quarternary.

Apr 15, 2020: Our courses 'Naturgefahren: Grundlagen' and 'Wie natürlich sind Naturkatastrophen im Anthrophozän?' will be online until further notice.Please visit PULS and click here for more details.

Feb 10-26, 2020: Our group member Elisabeth Schönfeldt has been on a field campaign in Argentinian Patagonia. Click here to read her impressions in the field.

Jan 02, 2020: A reporter from Deutschlandfunk interviewed our group member Georg on our new study on glacier lake outburst floods (in german).

Dec 30, 2019: Click here to learn more about the return periods of catastrophic moraine-dam failures in the Himalayas.