A Recipe for Climate Disaster
It is easy to view the ground as stable, as fixed, as immovable, even when deep down we know that it’s not. Sometimes the earth seems to shudder, as with an earthquake, and sometimes it pops, as with a volcanic eruption. Other times the earth slips, bits of dirt, handfuls of pebbles, beads of water combining and shifting until they coalesce into a cascade that blocks roads, shears homes from their foundations, and claims precious lives.
This happened in Ecuador earlier this year, when heavy rains triggered a hillside collapse in Quito, killing at least 24 people. It happened in Montecito, California, in 2018, when a type of landslide called a debris flow killed 23 people. And it happened in the Indian state of Uttarakhand in 2013, when roughly 13 inches of rain caused a slope along the eastern snout of a nearby glacier to fail. That landslide, along with the floods that helped trigger it,
