The science of big boulders
As outstanding features in the landscape, large boulders have long captured the imagination of humans

As outstanding features in the landscape, large boulders have long captured the imagination of humans. But from a scientific perspective they can also provide valuable information on geohazards, such as tsunamis, floods and landslides.
Researchers in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, in collaboration with other national and international research institutes, have been at the forefront of understanding what big boulders can tell us about related geohazards. The novel approaches to boulder studies that we are currently pursuing include:
Within the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Plymouth, these data are being used to improve our understanding of flood- and landslide related geohazards in vulnerable desert communities in the Western Mediterranean, Saharan region and the Peru-Chile Atacama. In these dry-land settings, occasional extreme floods are often associated with large landslides that amplify meteorological flood size by creating temporary dams, which subsequently breach and fail. In the Peru-Chile Atacama Desert - the oldest and driest desert on Earth - recent (e.g. 2015) floods wreaked havoc on local communities but these events are small in comparison to mega-floods recorded by boulders in pre-historic sediments.
Preliminary research indicates that
these ancient flood-boulders
originated from > 1 million year old
giant-landslide dams, where the
landslides are earthquake triggered.
The resulting features may lie dormant
in the landscape for many years
until a meteorological flood event
occurs and is impeded by their
presence, a factor not accounted for
in current hazard assessments in this
environment. Unravelling the story
of these boulders is currently being
undertaken with funding from both
National Geographic (Chile) and the
Royal Geographical Society (Morocco).