CEOAS faculty are renowned for understanding and predicting environmental hazards, especially those that impact our lives and livelihoods, ecosystems and economies. Whether abrupt threats such as coastal storms or the slow creep of sea-level rise, we undertake rigorous, interdisciplinary study of hazards and the human response to them to help build resilient communities.

This group studies the nearshore, the narrow edge of the ocean where ocean hazards intersect with human populations and coastal ecosystems. These challenges are strongly interdisciplinary, necessitating an understanding of subjects as diverse as the fluid dynamics of nearshore waves and currents as they propagate onto sedimentary coastlines, the erosive response of the coasts to those forces, and the familiar coastal morphologies that result from these interactions.

Affiliated faculty: Rob Holman, Tuba Özkan-Haller, Peter Ruggiero, and Greg Wilson

Interdisciplinary research efforts include the behavior of subduction zone earthquakes, spatial and temporal variations in fault slip over millennial time scales, and the hazards associated with magmatic and volcanic processes in all tectonic environments.

Affiliated faculty: Andrew Meigs, Shan de Silva, Adam Kent, and Anthony Koppers

Research emphasizes the ice ages as a natural laboratory for understanding past, present and future climate and sea-level change. Ongoing projects include the role that oceans play in long-term climate changes, past changes and their causes in ice-sheets and glaciers, and patterns of large-scale climate and sea-level change. Faculty and students collect and analyze deep sea sediment cores, lake sediments, ice cores, and glacial and other sedimentary deposits from around the world, and run and analyze state-of-the-art climate models.

Affiliated faculty: Ed Brook, Peter Clark, JC Creveling, Alan Mix, Jonathan Nash, Erin Pettit, Andreas Schmittner, Joe Stoner, and Maureen Walczak

Faculty in this research area examine risk and resilience, climate change adaptation, human migration and political ecology across spatial and temporal scales. Methods include satellite imagery, climate models, and human displacement data to understand how environmental hazards influence short- and long-term land-use patterns and the human response to conflict, disaster and climate change.

Affiliated faculty: Jamon Van Den Hoek, Jenna Tilt, James Watson, and David Wrathall