Yielding, Flow, and Healing in Slightly Wet Granular Matter - Humidity-Induced Capillary Cohesion and Its Role in Debris Flows, Landslides, and Post-Fire Hazards

Explore the complex physics of slightly wet granular materials and their role in natural hazards through this 43-minute conference talk examining humidity-induced capillary cohesion and its impact on debris flows, landslides, and post-fire hazards. Discover how Earth materials like soil, mud, ice, and rocks exist in a transitional state between solid and fluid depending on timescales, exhibiting soft matter behaviors including glassy dynamics, strain localization, memory encoding in microstructure, and complex yielding mechanisms. Learn about the intersection of geophysics and soft matter physics, where Earth material mixtures, excitations, geometries, and scales present novel scientific challenges that demand innovative theoretical and experimental approaches. Gain insights into how recent research reveals that frontiers in geophysics are simultaneously frontiers in soft matter physics, potentially leading to advances in both fields through interdisciplinary collaboration. Understand the multi-scale dynamics of earth materials and how non-traditional approaches are needed to address problems related to landslides, earthquakes, erosion, glaciers, and exotic transport phenomena, presented as part of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics conference on soft matter physics in Earth systems.