Samuel Muñoz, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in the Department of Marine & Environmental Sciences, Northeastern University | Faculty Affiliate, Global Resilience Institute
Boston, MA, UNITED STATES
Research in my lab focuses on understanding hydrological extremes and their connections to the natural and built environment.
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Biography
Research in my lab focuses on understanding hydrological extremes and their connections to the natural and built environment. We are interested in the influence of climate variability, greenhouse warming, urbanization, and land use on flood risk. We are also interested in how floods and climate-related disasters shape landscapes and the inhabitants of those landscapes.
Extreme events occur infrequently, so our research draws on historical and geological perspectives to better evaluate the causes and consequences of storms and floods. Our projects typically use sedimentary records to reconstruct environmental changes over hundreds to thousands of years. We combine these geological records with instrumental, historical, and archaeological datasets to inform a variety of computational approaches, including statistical and earth system models.
Areas of Expertise (5)
Coupled Human-Natural Systems
Rivers and Fluvial Processes
Sedimentary Records of Environmental Change
Paleoclimate and Climate Change
Natural Hazards and Hydroclimatic Extremes
Education (3)
University of Wisconsin-Madison: Ph. D., Physical Geography 2015
Minor: Quaternary Science
University of Ottawa: M.Sc., Geography 2010
Carelton University: B.Sc, Physical Geography 2008
Links (2)
Media Appearances (5)
Taming the Mighty Mississippi May Have Caused Bigger Floods
Scientific American
2018-04-10
Now a new study raises the possibility much of the effort humans have put into trying to control the mighty river has paradoxically made its large floods more destructive. The magnitude of so-called 100-year floods—massive inundations defined as having a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year—has increased 20 percent in the past five centuries on the lower Mississippi, researchers reported this month in Nature. The bulk of the increase has been in the last 150 years, when human engineering of the river has been most intense. “We’ve channelized the river, we’ve straightened it,” says Samuel Muñoz, lead author of the new study and an assistant professor of marine and environmental sciences at Northeastern University. “We’ve made the gradient steeper, and we’ve encased the river in concrete mats and lined it with levees.”...
Study Says Man Made Technology Worsens Flooding of the Mississippi River
IR Insider
2018-04-08
Lead by Samuel Munoz, an Assistant Professor of Marine and Environmental Studies at Northeastern University, researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) compiled data from tree rings and the bottom sediment of lakes and marshes in order to record the flooding history of the river in the last 500 years...
Engineers tried to tame the Mississippi River. They only made flooding worse
Grist
2018-04-07
Luckily, rivers inscribe their history onto the landscape. Which is why Samuel Muñoz, a geoscientist from Northeastern University, found himself balancing on a pontoon boat with a hole in the middle, trying to jam 30 feet of aluminum irrigation pipe into the muddy bottom of a 500-year-old oxbow lake. Muñoz and his team thought that if they could just pull up good cores of that mud, the layers would be a chronology of forgotten floods — a fossil record of the river’s inconstancy made not through petrification but implication...
Mississippi River keeps flooding and humans are to blame, data show
News @ Northeastern
2018-04-05
The Army Corp of Engineers has installed levees, dams, and other man-made elements to tame the Mississippi. But it still floods, sometimes with devastating consequences. And, in fact, those engineered systems may have inadvertently heightened the flood hazard, according to new research led by geoscientist Samuel Munoz, assistant professor of marine and environmental sciences at Northeastern...
Too Much Engineering Has Made Mississippi River Floods Worse
WIRED
2018-04-04
Luckily, rivers inscribe their history onto the landscape. Which is why Samuel Muñoz, a geoscientist from Northeastern University, found himself balancing on a pontoon boat with a hole in the middle, trying to jam 30 feet of aluminum irrigation pipe into the muddy bottom of a 500-year-old oxbow lake. Muñoz and his team thought that if they could just pull up good cores of that mud, the layers would be a chronology of forgotten floods—a fossil record of the river’s inconstancy made not through petrification but implication...
Articles (3)
Neoglacial Climate Anomalies and the Harappan Metamorphosis
Climate of the Past
L Goisan, William D Orsi, Marco Coolen, Cornelia Wuchter, Ann G Dunlea, Kaustubh Thirumalai, Samuel E Munoz, Peter D Clift, Jeffrey P Donnelly, Valier Galy, D Fuller
2018 Climate exerted constraints on the growth and decline of past human societies but our knowledge of temporal and spatial climatic patterns is often too restricted to address causal connections. At a global scale, the inter-hemispheric thermal balance provides an emergent framework for understanding regional Holocene climate variability. As the thermal balance adjusted to gradual changes in the seasonality of insolation, the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone migrated southward accompanied by a weakening of the Indian summer monsoon...
An evaluation of fecal stanols as indicators of population change at Cahokia, Illinois
Journal of Archaeological Science
AJ White, Lora R Stevens, Varenka Lorenzi, Samuel E Munoz, Carl P Lipo, Sissel Schroeder
2018 Fecal stanols deposited in sediment provide evidence of trace human waste products and have been proposed as a proxy for measuring population change. Despite its potential to contribute to paleodemographic studies, the method has not been evaluated against conventional archaeological population reconstructions to determine its fidelity in identifying changes in ancient populations nor has it been applied in an environmental setting outside of the Arctic, where low temperatures enhance stanol preservation. We studied sediment cores recovered from a lake adjacent to Cahokia, the largest and most well-studied prehistoric mound center in North America...
Climatic control of Mississippi River flood hazard amplified by river engineering
Nature
Samuel E Munoz, Liviu Giosan, Matthew D Therrell, Jonathan WF Remo, Zhixiong Shen, Richard M Sullivan, Charlotte Wiman, Michelle O’Donnell, Jeffrey P Donnelly
2018 Over the past century, many of the world's major rivers have been modified for the purposes of flood mitigation, power generation and commercial navigation. Engineering modifications to the Mississippi River system have altered the river's sediment levels and channel morphology, but the influence of these modifications on flood hazard is debated. Detecting and attributing changes in river discharge is challenging because instrumental streamflow records are often too short to evaluate the range of natural hydrological variability before the establishment of flood mitigation infrastructure...