Five months after their initial presentation to the community, a team of university landslide experts is returning to town to provide an update on their research surrounding the November 2023 landslides that hit Wrangell.
Margaret Darrow and her team of experts will speak at 6 p.m. Saturday at the Nolan Center. The presentation is expected to run a couple hours and pizza will be provided.
The event is free to the public.
“It’s supposed to be another great presentation,” Nolan Center Director Jeanie Arnold said. “The last one was really inclusive, and very community oriented. We’re happy to host them again.”
Darrow is a professor of geological engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Josh Roering, a University of Oregon geomorphologist, and Annette Patton, a watershed extension specialist from Oregon State University, will join Darrow at the Saturday presentation.
This is the second time the team of scientists have come to town to present their findings publicly. However, their presentation at the Nolan Center back in August was more of a conversation between them and the community.
As they were still seeking information about the Wrangell slides, the scientists relied heavily on the community’s first-hand accounts to piece together the specific causes of the earth movement. Though Darrow said the past five months have yielded more findings, there will still be that back-and-forth component, similar to the original presentation.
“That’s why we go to the community: to deliver what we know but also learn what people have to say,” she said.
In addition to sourcing information from the community in August, the scientists visited the site of the slide and examined the area around it. However, their August presentation came right in the middle of their field work, meaning they were only able to share about half their observations. Darrow said they will be able to share the latter half of those findings this time around.
“We’re still in the midst of doing lab testing on the soil,” she said. “But we have some results that we can share: analysis of the LIDAR data (laser images taken by airborne cameras) and more of our observations from walking around in August.”
The worst of the slides on Nov. 20, 2023, killed six people caught in their homes near 11-Mile Zimovia Highway.
The team receives its funding through the National Science Foundation’s rapid response research grant, called RAPID. However, with the grant expiring in February, this will likely be the team’s last in-person trip to Wrangell. However, Darrow refused to rule out a future virtual presentation if surprising research results appear in the months ahead.
Currently two undergraduate students are conducting soil-sample testing in Darrow’s lab in Fairbanks. However, conclusions from those tests are at least a month away.
She said the team is also working on a manuscript to submit for review to a scientific journal.
“We’ll let everyone in Wrangell know when it has come out,” she said.
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