The Department of Geography has been making distinctive, fundamental contributions to understandings of how changing societal and environmental patterns and processes are shaping the unprecedented perils and promises facing the world. Reflecting the productivity of our research on human-environment interactions, our faculty and students are actively publishing their work on wide-ranging topics, including environmental changes on long time scales, the dynamics of river-scapes and related fluvial geomorphic processes, spatial modeling, racial/ethno-cultural dynamics, environmental justice and vulnerability, the politics of social and economic development, and so on.
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An 1867 Washington deluge shows the region’s potential for flooding
An 1867 flood in western Washington surpassed anything that the region has seen in the last century, new University of Oregon research shows, offering a foreboding look at what storms fueled by climate change could now produce.
In that long-ago flood, an atmospheric river combined with snowmelt to deliver record amounts of precipitation over a three-day period. The event provides a pre-industrialization benchmark for what flooding in Washington’s modern urban corridors could now look like, the researchers report Dec. 19 in the journal PLOS Climate.