paraglacial-hazard-utac

GenesisAeon Package 102 — paraglacial and geophysical hazard science. Companion to glacial-seismicity-utac (P101): extends GIA/seismicity with a real contrasting case, and adds two more real paraglacial hazard domains. Deliberately has no UTAC/CREP/AFET bridge — see DISCLAIMER.md.

For a plain-language explanation of the same topic (German, no jargon, written for general audiences), see WHITEPAPER.md.

What's real here

• GIA context (gia_context.py): Grosset, Mazzotti & Vernant (2023, Solid Earth) — in the Western Alps, GIA explains much of the observed geodetic deformation but does not drive the observed seismicity. A real contrast to P101's Alaska/Fairweather case, where GIA-induced stress plausibly did help promote a specific large earthquake. GIA "explains deformation" and "drives seismicity" are two independent questions — this module makes that explicit.
• Permafrost & rock-slope instability (slope_instability.py): Ballantyne (2002)'s foundational paraglacial-geomorphology concept (post-deglaciation landscapes are unstable, activity declines over time) plus a real, recent dataset — Fey, Wichmann & Zangerl (2025, ESPL) found permafrost terrain (22% of their Eastern Alps study area) hosts 76% of rockfalls, and terrain deglaciated since 1969 (4.7% of the area) hosts 40% of rockfalls. Mechanism: Gruber & Haeberli (2007, JGR).
• GLOF exposure (glof.py): Taylor, Robinson, Dunning et al. (2023, Nature Communications) — 15 million people globally exposed to glacial lake outburst flood risk, over half in India, Pakistan, Peru and China. Lützow, Veh & Korup (2023, ESSD) — the historic event record (3,151 events, 850–2022 CE, 27 countries) is dominated by NW North America and Iceland instead — event frequency and human exposure are different, weakly correlated risk axes.

Quickstart

pip install paraglacial-hazard-utac

from paraglacial_hazard_utac import (
    WESTERN_ALPS,
    is_deformation_seismicity_paradox,
    permafrost_overrepresentation_factor,
    recently_deglaciated_overrepresentation_factor,
    GLOBAL_EXPOSURE,
    HISTORIC_RECORD,
)

print(is_deformation_seismicity_paradox(WESTERN_ALPS))  # True
print(permafrost_overrepresentation_factor())            # ~3.45
print(recently_deglaciated_overrepresentation_factor())  # ~8.5
print(GLOBAL_EXPOSURE.exposed_population_millions)        # 15.0
print(HISTORIC_RECORD.nw_north_america_share_pct)         # 26.0

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pre-commit install
ruff check src tests
mypy src
pytest

Citation

See CITATION.cff and .zenodo.json.