Karin Lehnigk
Please join us for an informal, Zoom coffee hour on January 29, 2025 at 11:00 AM Pacific / 2:00 PM Eastern celebrating Karin and our January 2025 Early Career Spotlight winner (Shayla Triantafillou). You can register for our Zoom here.
Tell us about yourself
My name is Karin Lehnigk (pronounced “LEN-nick”). I grew up about half an hour from DC, a city which has, among many other great qualities, a bunch of free museums. Those museums, especially the Natural History Museum, sparked my interest in science and put the idea of becoming a marine biologist in my head. That quickly changed after I took high school bio and found it incredibly dull. At the same time, though, I was doing an internship in a paleoclimate lab at the USGS in Reston, VA, where I met a lot of very cool and very kind geologists, who taught me how they used microfossils in the sedimentary record to find out about past ocean and climate conditions. This was more like it! So I went to college at William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA to get a B.S. in Geology, and then on to UMass Amherst for my PhD. Right now, I’m a postdoc at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. And yes, I still go back to the DC museums whenever I can–in fact, in a real full-circle moment, I had a brief internship at the National Air & Space Museum after I completed my PhD.
What is your research about?
I study outburst floods – catastrophic releases of stored water from natural or human-made reservoirs – and how they change landscapes. The outburst floods I study range from giant floods billions of years ago on Mars to modern dam-break floods that pose risks to people and infrastructure. My research integrates hydraulic modeling, GIS and topographic analysis, and field mapping of flood features to reveal how topography and flood hydrology influence each other–topography controls where the water goes, but the water can also change topography by erosion.
What excites you about your research?
My PhD thesis dealt with ancient Ice Age floods that carved giant canyons in a part of eastern Washington called the Channeled Scabland, and I still have a special fondness for these types of huge, ancient floods. Recognizing the impact that outburst floods have had on the geomorphology, hydrology, climate, and culture in many places around the world has inspired big ideas in each of these areas about the role of extreme events in driving change. I think it’s this interdisciplinary nature of outburst floods that I find most exciting.
What broader importance does your research have for society?
Outburst floods are becoming more and more common as a result of climate change–as glaciers retreat, they produce high rates of meltwater runoff and accelerate production of new glacial lakes. These modern outburst floods are much smaller than the giant Ice Age floods that formed the Channeled Scabland, but as demand for water increases (and drives dam construction in many parts of the world), more people around the world are living downstream of natural and manmade reservoirs that could potentially generate outburst floods. Outburst floods can be catastrophic for downstream communities from the impacts from the flood itself, but also from the loss of essential water resources. I hope that understanding the behavior, triggers, and impacts of outburst floods will help promote sustainable development and help us coexist with our dynamic planet.
What inspired you to pursue a career in Earth Science?
At William & Mary I got to participate in several excellent field courses which took me all over the US. I had never been camping before college, but after my first trip I found that I loved camping and fieldwork, and discovering that this was part of the job for many geologists was a definite plus. The highlight of these field courses was a geomorphology-focused journey through California led by Greg Hancock, where the breadth of the field and its impact on society really resonated with me. Geomorphology deals with the part of the Earth that we interact with directly, and as I continued through grad school and learned about the surface processes behind things like natural hazards, soil health, water availability, and climate impacts, I became increasingly convinced that I could find an impactful and fulfilling career as a geomorphologist.
What are you looking to do after you complete your PhD or postdoc?
I will be starting a NASA postdoc at Goddard Space Flight Center in MD in March to estimate water and sediment storage in outburst flood-prone lakes using remote sensing and machine learning. I’m really excited to work with data from the new Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite on water surface elevations in outburst flood-prone lakes around the world for this project, and not just because its main instrument, the Ka-Band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) has the same name as me.
Given unlimited funding and access to resources, what is your dream project that you would pursue?
Collecting direct observations of outburst floods is nearly impossible, since they are such unpredictable and energetic events, and because they tend to occur predominantly in remote mountain environments where fieldwork is especially challenging. However, new satellites like SWOT are able to make increasingly detailed remote measurements of lake, river, and reservoir stages–SWOT has even captured water surface elevations for a few active outburst floods! So we’re starting to get some great data about the height of water surfaces in flood-prone catchments, but without field data on what the bottoms of these water bodies look like, it’s still challenging to get real-world constraints on outburst flood discharges and the volume of stored water, and to incorporate this information into flood models. So I would love to see a greater push to map bathymetry for rivers, lakes, and reservoirs in outburst flood-prone catchments to complement these new satellite measurements of water surface elevations (and a career traveling the world to visit pretty lakes sounds delightful to me). Bathymetry has a huge influence on the hydrology of an outburst flood, so synthesizing and expanding access to existing data as well as an ongoing community-led effort to expand coverage and monitor changes would greatly improve the accuracy of predictive flood models, reveal processes by which outburst floods impact landscapes on short timescales, and learn how outburst floods shape landscapes on much longer timescales. Plus, let’s throw in some more water surface elevation-sensing satellites to decrease the time between observations–you've given me unlimited funding, after all!
What else do you do? Any hobbies or interests outside of work?
There are also a ton of free art galleries and performance venues in DC, and these left their impression as well. I am quite bad at quite a lot of art styles now, but some that I particularly enjoy are sketching (you can see some of my landscape sketches on my website), woodburning (you can see some of my woodburnings on my instagram), and tap dancing (we have to be pretty good friends for you to see me tap dance). I also spend a lot of time working in my garden, and am a site leader for a program that removes invasive plants and plants native plants in my county parks. And when I need to let off steam I enjoy running, biking, hiking, swimming, kayaking, and crossword puzzles.
Get more information about Karin's work at: https://klehnigk.github.io/