Reminder: SSA 2026 session — Detecting, Characterizing, and Monitoring Mass Movements

[Toney, Liam D]

Dear colleagues,

With the abstract submission deadline approaching, we would like to remind you of the session Detecting, Characterizing, and Monitoring Mass Movements at the Seismological Society of America (SSA) 2026 Annual Meeting in Pasadena, California (14 April – 18 April 2026). More information about the meeting may be found at the SSA 2026 Annual Meeting website.

Session details:

Detecting, Characterizing, and Monitoring Mass Movements

Evolving climate patterns and land-use changes coupled with improved monitoring capabilities have caused a notable increase in geophysical detections of mass movements, such as landslides, debris and snow avalanches, lahars, and glacial failures. Recent examples include the Blatten landslide in Switzerland, the Wanrog rock avalanche in Taiwan, and the Tracy Arm tsunamigenic landslide in Alaska, USA. Mass movements couple energy into the Earth and atmosphere, making seismic and infrasound analysis useful for detecting, characterizing, and monitoring these events. While these sources are not routinely monitored in real-time like earthquakes, recent advancements in seismic and infrasound instrumentation and processing offer opportunities for rapid early warning and post-event detection and analysis. Combining seismic and infrasound methods with auxiliary datasets from e.g., remote sensing, ground-based flow monitoring, and distributed sensing further improves event characterization. Passive seismic analysis can also provide valuable information about incipient or ongoing slope instabilities.

This session explores innovative research focused on improving our comprehension of various types of mass movements as seismic sources. We invite presentations that investigate the use of seismic and infrasound data as well as interdisciplinary datasets to expand our knowledge of fundamental landslide processes, enhance our ability to characterize and monitor mass movement events, and mitigate associated hazards. Topics of interest encompass, but are not limited to, mass movement source detection, location, characterization, modeling and classification, precursory signal analysis, monitoring, and hazard mitigation.

Conveners

Avery Conner, University of Oregon (acon...@uoregon.edu)

Ezgi Karasozen, University of Alaska Fairbanks (ekara...@alaska.edu)

Liam Toney, U.S. Geological Survey (lto...@usgs.gov)

We invite you to submit your abstracts to our session, and feel free to reach out to the session conveners if you have any questions. The abstract deadline is 13 January 2026. Thank you for your interest!

Sincerely,

Liam (on behalf of all conveners)

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Liam Toney | he/him/his
Research Geologist
Geologic Hazards Science Center
U.S. Geological Survey
web: usgs.gov/staff-profiles/liam-toney