College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

• Debris field

  Richard Iverson has become one of the world's leading experts in debris flow



• Richard Iverson owes a lot to Mount St. Helens.
  
  After leaving Iowa State with a B.S. degree in geology in 1977, Iverson went to graduate school at Stanford and was still on the West Coast when the nation's most famous volcano erupted in May 1980.
  
  That eruption, in part, helped Iverson get his first job after completing his graduate work.
  
  "In the early 1980s I was one of a large number of graduate students working part-time for the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) in California," he said. "But the USGS wasn't hiring too many people permanently when I finished my doctoral work in 1984."
  
  The exception was the Vancouver station where geologists continued to monitor Mount St. Helens and the rest of the Cascade Mountain Range.
  
  "In 1984, Mount St. Helens was still erupting and the USGS had a special exemption to hire scientists for the offices in Vancouver," Iverson said. "They offered me a permanent job up here even though I knew nothing about volcanoes."
  
  Iverson's expertise is landslides and debris flows. His research looks at better understanding the mudflows and landslides that come off volcanoes, triggered by eruptions, earthquakes or a spontaneous collapse.
  
  Such a case was the May 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.
  
  "This job turned out to be a really good fit between my interests and volcano hazards," he said.
  
  While many USGS colleagues are concerned with the activities that occur within a volcano, Iverson's research looks at activities that happen above ground.
  
  But that doesn't necessarily make the research all that much easier to conduct.
  
  "There's a long record of frustration with data collection in the field," Iverson said. "Landslides in the field don't always cooperate with you."
  
  With that in mind, Iverson went about devising a way that he could observe debris flows firsthand. He has created a debris flow flume on a plot of land 50 miles east of Eugene, Ore., on a facility administered jointly by Oregon State University and the U.S. Forest Service.
  
  He and other USGS researchers now utilize this giant slide for mud – a 100-meter long, 2-meter wide cement flume bolted to a mountainside at a 30-degree angle. Iverson got the idea while on a trip to Japan in the late 1980s where he went to do some landslide experiments.
  
  "It opened my eyes to the possibility of doing experiments in a controlled environment instead of in the field, which would give us a huge advantage," he said.
  
  Iverson had a rough idea of how he wanted the flume to work and designed it based on the 30-degree slope because that was "typical of where landslides occur in the field."
  
  He worked with structure engineers to come up with the finished design.
  
  Funding and location were a problem because the researchers needed to build a structure as big as possible to mimic natural events. The site where the flume was eventually located was ideal because it contained an existing road to the top of the slope.
  
  The first few years of experiments at the flume site proved to provide a steep learning curve for Iverson and his colleagues. They put a combination of sediment and water at the top of the flume and then release it.
  
  "In the very first experiment we wanted to have a spectacular show," Iverson said, "so we put 12 cubic meters of wet sediment in the flume, which amounted to roughly 30 tons of material. The material came out so slowly that it simply coated the bed of the flume, and it took nearly a week to get all the sediment out."
  
  Now Iverson and his colleagues are pretty efficient with their experiments. He is able to collect data on flow depth and velocity, which has been used to improve computer models for predicting the behavior of mudflows and to verify theories about previous flows.
  
  The facility gets use not only by his research group but others throughout the world. Each summer Iverson tries to conduct experiments on a couple of different occasions.
  
  But that is becoming more and more difficult. For that Iverson can thank Mount St. Helens, which has again begun to rumble. The Vancouver USGS office maintains a 24-7 watch on the mountain. And with a reduction of staff at the facility, everyone gets into the act – even a landslide expert like Richard Iverson.

Ames, Iowa 50011, (515) 294-4111. Published by: University Relations, online@iastate.edu. Copyright © 1995-2004, Iowa State University of Science and Technology. All rights reserved.

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