NERC KE ERIIP Fellowship - Environmental risks to infrastructure: Identifying and filling the gaps

NERC KE ERIIP 奖学金 - 基础设施的环境风险：识别和填补空白

• 批准号: NE/P005780/1
• 负责人: Mike Clare
• 金额: $ 30.14万
• 依托单位: NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHY CENTRE
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2016 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=NE%2FP005780%2F1
• 关键词: NERC; KE; ERIIP; Fellowship; Environmental

A wide range of infrastructure underpins our day-to-day lives, yet our intense reliance on these potentially vulnerable systems is often forgotten. Road and rail provide transport, pipelines carry energy and water, and cables transmit and distribute power and communications. Some of these networks are over 100 years old, while others involve brand new technology, but all of them have potential weaknesses to environmental hazards. Several recent network failures caused by such natural hazards have provided a sharp wake up call. Examples include the Dawlish railway collapse due to storms in 2014, damage to homes, bridges and roads in Cumbria in 2014/15, and flooding in Somerset leading to widespread loss of power in 2013/14. These events had profound impacts on people's lives, as well as large costs (>£Ms) to the local and UK economy. Such events may become more likely and more intense as the world continues to warm. In extreme cases, environmental hazards can have global implications. The 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland, for example, caused worldwide disruptions to air traffic, yet prior to its occurrence the effects of ash on aircraft engines had not been considered a major risk. Thus, there is a need to better understand the risk posed by environmental hazards to infrastructure. This is particularly important as we experience changes in our climate, as new technology is developed, new areas are explored, and populations grow. This fellowship aims to help address this risk through identifying gaps in our knowledge and assessing how future research can fill them. Importantly, this fellowship is supported by several industry organisations that are directly involved in assessing the risk posed by natural hazards to a wide range of infrastructure. The proposed work will involve time spent with those specialists, to understand the potential impacts, lessons learned, and how ongoing and future research can make real changes and improvements to assessing environmental risk. First, the fellowship will determine whether industry has missed any key hazards, such as the Icelandic ash cloud and its impact on air travel. An inventory of potential hazards will be compiled and assessed by a joint academic and industry panel. This may include new hazards such as the breakage of subsea communication cables by underwater avalanches of sediment ('turbidity currents'). Such cables transport 99% of the world's communications including important financial data and the internet. Extreme events are difficult to predict as we have not typically experienced many (if any) since accurate records have been kept. Despite this, they can be the most damaging events. The fellowship will explore different techniques and tools for predicting and assessing extreme hazards such as developing new statistical methods that are more often used in medicine or financial studies. Such tools will need to include the effects of future climate change. Often, individual large events may not damage infrastructure, but the combined or successive effect of smaller natural hazards may be catastrophic. Here, it is proposed to summarise the lessons learned from a number of infrastructure owners, consultants and contractors to understand how we can better understand compound or cumulative impacts, and how that can inform the development of models in future.In the same way as you go to the doctor to get a health check, it is important to understand the health of infrastructure. Historically this has been done by in-person inspections, but step changes in technology now enable remote and real-time monitoring. New technologies that can be used to monitor natural hazards and their impact on infrastructure will be summarised. Groups of researchers and industry representatives will be paired up to see how we can define best practice for industry in real-time monitoring of environmental hazards and increase cost-effectiveness of such efforts.

各种各样的基础设施支撑着我们的日常生活，然而我们对这些潜在的脆弱系统的强烈依赖往往被遗忘。公路和铁路提供运输，管道输送能源和水，电缆传输和分配电力和通信。其中一些网络已经有100多年的历史了，而另一些则采用了全新的技术，但它们都有潜在的弱点，可能会对环境造成危害。最近几起由此类自然灾害引起的网络故障为我们敲响了警钟。例子包括2014年因暴风雨导致的德力士铁路坍塌，2014/15年坎布里亚郡房屋、桥梁和道路受损，以及2013/14年萨默塞特郡洪水导致大面积停电。这些事件对人们的生活产生了深远的影响，对当地和英国经济造成了巨大的损失（50亿英镑）。随着世界继续变暖，这类事件可能会变得更有可能、更激烈。在极端情况下，环境危害可能具有全球性影响。例如，2010年冰岛Eyjafjallajökull火山喷发造成了全球范围内的空中交通中断，但在其发生之前，火山灰对飞机发动机的影响并未被认为是一项重大风险。因此，有必要更好地了解环境危害对基础设施构成的风险。随着气候的变化、新技术的开发、新领域的探索和人口的增长，这一点尤为重要。该奖学金旨在通过确定我们的知识差距并评估未来的研究如何填补这些差距来帮助解决这一风险。重要的是，该奖学金得到了几个行业组织的支持，这些组织直接参与评估自然灾害对各种基础设施造成的风险。拟议的工作将包括与这些专家一起花时间，了解潜在的影响，吸取的教训，以及正在进行的和未来的研究如何能对评估环境风险做出真正的改变和改进。首先，该奖学金将确定行业是否错过了任何关键的危险，比如冰岛火山灰云及其对航空旅行的影响。一个学术和行业联合小组将汇编和评估一份潜在危害清单。这可能包括新的危险，如水下沉积物雪崩（“浑浊流”）破坏海底通信电缆。这些电缆传输了世界上99%的通信，包括重要的金融数据和互联网。极端事件很难预测，因为我们通常没有经历过很多（如果有的话），因为有准确的记录。尽管如此，它们可能是最具破坏性的事件。该奖学金将探索预测和评估极端灾害的不同技术和工具，例如开发更常用于医学或金融研究的新统计方法。这些工具需要包括未来气候变化的影响。通常，单个的大型事件可能不会破坏基础设施，但较小的自然灾害的组合或连续影响可能是灾难性的。在此，建议总结从一些基础设施业主、顾问和承包商那里吸取的经验教训，以了解我们如何更好地理解复合或累积影响，以及如何为未来模式的发展提供信息。就像你去看医生做健康检查一样，了解基础设施的健康状况也很重要。从历史上看，这是由现场检查完成的，但技术的逐步变化现在使远程和实时监控成为可能。将总结可用于监测自然灾害及其对基础设施影响的新技术。研究人员和行业代表将组成小组，共同探讨如何为实时监测环境危害的行业制定最佳实践，并提高此类努力的成本效益。

项目成果

Predicting turbidity current activity offshore from meltwater-fed river deltas

• DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2022.117977
• 发表时间: 2023-02
• 期刊: Earth and Planetary Science Letters
• 影响因子: 5.3
• 作者: L. Bailey;M. Clare;E. Pope;I. Haigh;M. Cartigny;P. Talling;D. Lintern;S. Hage;M. Heijnen

Lessons learned from monitoring of turbidity currents and guidance for future platform designs

从浊流监测中汲取的经验教训以及对未来平台设计的指导

• DOI: 10.31223/osf.io/4qtxj
• 发表时间: 2020
• 作者: Clare M

Complex and Cascading Triggering of Submarine Landslides and Turbidity Currents at Volcanic Islands Revealed From Integration of High-Resolution Onshore and Offshore Surveys

• DOI: 10.3389/feart.2018.00223
• 发表时间: 2018-09
• 期刊: Frontiers in Earth Science
• 影响因子: 2.9
• 作者: M. Clare;T. Le Bas;D. Price;J. Hunt;D. Sear;M. Cartigny;A. Vellinga;W. Symons;C. Firth;S. Cronin

Knickpoints and crescentic bedform interactions in submarine channels

• DOI: 10.1111/sed.12886
• 发表时间: 2021-06-01
• 期刊: SEDIMENTOLOGY
• 影响因子: 3.5
• 作者: Chen, Ye;Parsons, Daniel R.;Vendettuoli, Daniela
• 通讯作者: Vendettuoli, Daniela

Climate change hotspots and implications for the global subsea telecommunications network

• DOI: 10.1016/j.earscirev.2022.104296
• 发表时间: 2023-01-19
• 期刊: EARTH-SCIENCE REVIEWS
• 影响因子: 12.1
• 作者: Clare，M. A.;Yeo，I. A.;Carter，L.
• 通讯作者: Carter，L.