Overtopping failure of noncohesive earthen dams was investigated in 13 large‐scale experiments with dams built of compacted, damp, fine‐grained sand. Breaching was initiated by cutting a notch across the dam crest and allowing water escaping from a finite upstream reservoir to form its own channel. The channel developed a stepped profile, and upstream migration of the steps, which coalesced into a headcut, led to the establishment of hydraulic control (critical flow) at the channel head, or breach crest, an arcuate erosional feature that functions hydraulically as a weir. Novel photogrammetric methods, along with underwater videography, revealed that the retreating headcut maintained a slope near the angle of friction of the sand, while the cross section at the breach crest maintained a geometrically similar shape through time. That cross‐sectional shape was nearly unaffected by slope failures, contrary to the assumption in many models of dam breaching. Flood hydrographs were quite reproducible—for sets of dams ranging in height from 0.55 m to 0.98 m—when the time datum was chosen as the time that the migrating headcut intersected the breach crest. Peak discharge increased almost linearly as a function of initial dam height. Early‐time variability between flood hydrographs for nominally identical dams is probably a reflection of subtle experiment‐to‐experiment differences in groundwater hydrology and the interaction between surface water and groundwater.

A method of achieving a dimensionless collapse of erosion-rate data for cohesive sediments is proposed and shown to work well for data collected in flume-erosion tests on mixtures of sand and mud (silt plus clay sized particles) for a wide range of mud fraction. The data collapse corresponds to a dimensional erosion law of the form E similar to (tau - tau(c) )(m), where E is erosion rate, tau is shear stress, tau(c) is the threshold shear stress for erosion to occur, and m approximate to 7/4. This result contrasts with the commonly assumed linear erosion law E = k(d) (tau - tau(c)), where k(d) is a measure of how easily sediment is eroded. The data collapse prompts a re-examination of the way that results of the hole-erosion test (HET) and jet-erosion test (JET) are customarily analyzed, and also calls into question the meaningfulness not only of proposed empirical relationships between k(d) and tau(c), but also of the erodibility parameter k(d) itself. Fuller comparison of flume-erosion data with hole-erosion and jet-erosion data will require revised analyses of the HET and JET that drop the assumption m = 1 and, in the case of the JET, certain simplifying assumptions about the mechanics of jet scour. (C) 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Erosion of snow by pyroclastic flows and surges presumably involves mechanical scour, bur there may be thermally driven phenomena involved as well. To investigate this possibility, layers of hot (up to 400 degrees C), uniformly sized, fine- to medium-grained sand were emplaced vertically onto finely shaved ice ("snow"); thus there was no relative shear motion between sand and snow and no purely mechanical scour. In some cases large vapor bubbles, commonly more than 10 mm across, rose through the sand layer, burst at the surface, and caused complete convective overturn of the sand, which then scoured and mixed with snow and transformed into a slurry. In other cases no bubbling occurred and the sand passively melted its way downward into the snow as a wetting front moved upward into the sand. A continuum of behaviors between these two cases was observed. Vigorous bubbling and convection were generally favored by high temperature, small grain size, and small layer thickness. A physically based theory of heat- and mass transfer at the pyroclast/snow interface, developed in Part 1 of this paper, does a good job of explaining the observations as a manifestation of unstable vapor-driven fluidization. The theory, when extrapolated to the behavior of actual, poorly sorted pyroclastic flow sediments, leads to the prediction that the observed "thermal-scour" phenomenon should also occur for many real pyroclastic flows passing over snow. "Thermal scour" is therefore likely to be involved in the generation of lahars.

The theory of channelized water flow through glaciers, most commonly associated with the names of Hans Rothlisberger and Ron Shreve and their 1972 papers in the Journal of Glaciology, was developed at a time when interest in glacier bed processes was expanding, and the possible relationship between glacier sliding and water at the bed was becoming of keen interest. The R-channel theory provided for the first time a physically based conceptual model of water flow through glaciers. The theory also marks the emergence of glacier hydrology as a glaciological discipline with goals and methods distinct from those of surface-water hydrology.

Lava-dome emplacement through a glacier was observed for the first time during the 2004-08 eruption of Mount St. Helens and documented using photography, photogrammetry, and geodetic measurements. Previously published reports present such documentation through September 2006; this report extends that documentation until November 2009.

The process of lava-dome emplacement through a glacier was observed for the first time as the 2004-6 eruption of Mount St. Helens proceeded. The glacier that had grown in the crater since the cataclysmic 1980 eruption was split in two by the new lava dome. The two parts of the glacier were successively squeezed against the crater wall. Photography, photogrammetry, and geodetic measurements document glacier deformation of an extreme variety, with strain rates of extraordinary magnitude as compared to normal temperate alpine glaciers. Unlike such glaciers, the Mount St. Helens crater glacier shows no evidence of either speed-up at the beginning of the ablation season or diurnal speed fluctuations during the ablation season. Thus there is evidently no slip of the glacier over its bed. The most reasonable explanation for this anomaly is that meltwater penetrating the glacier is captured by a thick layer of coarse rubble at the bed and then enters the volcano's groundwater system rather than flowing through a drainage network along the bed. Mechanical consideration of the glacier-squeeze process also leads to an estimate for the driving pressure applied by the growing lava dome.

Mount Jefferson has erupted repeatedly for hundreds of thousands of years, with its last eruptive episode during the last major glaciation which culminated about 15,000 years ago. Geologic evidence shows that Mount Jefferson is capable of large explosive eruptions. The largest such eruption occurred between 35,000 and 100,000 years ago. If Mount Jefferson erupts again, areas close to the eruptive vent will be severely affected, and even areas tens of kilometers (tens of miles) downstream along river valleys or hundreds of kilometers (hundreds of miles) downwind may be at risk. Numerous small volcanoes occupy the area between Mount Jefferson and Mount Hood to the north, and between Mount Jefferson and the Three Sisters region to the south. These small volcanoes tend not to pose the far-reaching hazards associated with Mount Jefferson, but are nonetheless locally important. A concern at Mount Jefferson, but not at the smaller volcanoes, is the possibility that small-to-moderate sized landslides could occur even during periods of no volcanic activity. Such landslides may transform as they move into lahars (watery flows of rock, mud, and debris) that can inundate areas far downstream. The geographic information system (GIS) volcano hazard data layer used to produce the Mount Jefferson volcano hazard map in USGS Open-File Report 99-24 (Walder and others, 1999) is included in this data set. Both proximal and distal hazard zones were delineated by scientists at the Cascades Volcano Observatory and depict various volcano hazard areas around the mountain.

The process of lava-dome emplacement through a glacier was observed for the first time after Mount St Helens reawakened in September 2004. The glacier that had grown in the crater since the cataclysmic 1980 eruption was split in two by the new lava dome. The two parts of the glacier were successively squeezed against the crater wall. Photography, photogrammetry and geodetic measurements document glacier deformation of an extreme variety, with strain rates of extraordinary magnitude as compared to normal alpine glaciers. Unlike normal temperate glaciers, the crater glacier shows no evidence of either speed-up at the beginning of the ablation season or diurnal speed fluctuations during the ablation season. Thus there is evidently no slip of the glacier over its bed. The most reasonable explanation for this anomaly is that meltwater penetrating the glacier is captured by a thick layer of coarse rubble at the bed and then enters the volcano’s groundwater system rather than flowing through a drainage network along the bed.

The debris-rich glacier that grew in the crater of Mount St Helens after the volcano’s cataclysmic 1980 eruption was split in two by a new lava dome in 2004. For nearly six months, the eastern part of the glacier was squeezed against the crater wall as the lava dome expanded. Glacier thickness nearly doubled locally and surface speed increased substantially. As squeezing slowed and then stopped, surface speed fell and ice was redistributed downglacier. This sequence of events, which amounts to a field-scale experiment on the deformation of debris-rich ice at high strain rates, was interpreted using a two-dimensional flowband model. The best match between modeled and observed glacier surface motion, both vertical and horizontal, requires ice that is about 5 times stiffer and 1.2 times denser than normal, temperate ice. Results also indicate that lateral squeezing, and by inference lava-dome growth adjacent to the glacier, likely slowed over a period of about 30 days rather than stopping abruptly. This finding is supported by geodetic data documenting dome growth.