Supervisor: Christian ZANGERL

Project assigned to: Erik KUSCHEL 

Landslides pose an increasing risk for the livelihood of alpine communities given the accelerating demand for human settlement area and alpine infrastructure in the face of climate change. Landslide formation and kinematics are controlled by several factors (e.g. lithology, geological structures, tectonic and topographic stresses, groundwater, precipitation, permafrost degradation, glacial retreat) affecting slope stability of which many are influenced meteorology. Thus, there is a high confidence that the observed and predicted increase of meteorological extreme events in the wake of climate change will lead to increased landslide activity. Especially, in alpine and arctic regions as the rate of measured global temperature change increases with latitude and elevation.

Therefore, alpine and arctic environments are an important observatory to investigate past, current, and future slope and landslide dynamics. Landslide kinematics under changing climatological and meteorological conditions are nonetheless poorly understood. As the continuous or episodical long-term monitoring of landslides in alpine and arctic paraglacial environments is often difficult as the implementation of in situ monitoring systems is either to hazardous or expensive and datasets with the necessary spatial and temporal resolution are rare.

The core of the Ph.D. project is a cross-cutting research project focusing to identify, monitor and analyse landslide processes at different temporal resolutions (near-continuous to periodical) at several sites in alpine and arctic paraglacial environments, including the Austre Lovénbreen glacier basin (Svalbard, Norway), the Finstertal (Tirol. Austria), and the Steinlehnen landslide (Tirol. Austria). The research strategy comprises:

  • the collection and analysis of high-resolution spatio-temporal remote sensing data through I) Terrestrial LiDAR, II) Ground-based InSAR, III) Satellite based InSAR, IV) UAV-Photogrammetry and V) photo-monitoring;
  • the verification of collected remote sensing data through geodetic measurements (e.g. tachymetry and DGPS), and in situ methods (Lithology, XRD, geological field surveys);
  • the assessment of the potential and limitations of different remote sensing techniques for the detection, monitoring and process analysis of landslides in alpine conditions, as well as the mitigation of certain short-comings through multi-methodical approaches;
  • the assessment of the impact of seasonal fluctuations and metrological extreme events on the formation, kinematics and deformation rates of landslides.

The study will contribute to the debate of intra-annual and inter-annual landslides activity in paraglacial environments through diverse remote-sensing datasets and thereby enables to quantify the influence of meteorological factors on landslide formation. Thus, improving risk assessments of future effects of climate change on natural hazards relevant to communities in alpine regions. 

Figure 1: Terrestrial Laser scanning of the Austre Lovénbreen glacier and the adjacent slopes from the summit of Haavimbfjellet (Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, Norway). 

Figure 2: TLS displacement (right) and level of detection for the 95% confidence interval (left) between 2012 and 2018 for every two consecutive measurement campaigns of the Austre Lovénbreen basin.