This year’s annual SLATE workshop took the participants to Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, where the ESRs were introduced to a variety of techniques to map and sample subaqueous landslides. The workshop took off with a 2-day technical workshop on Lake Lucerne and in the laboratories of EAWAG Kastanienbaum to study various aspects of on- and offshore mass movements, earthquake-triggered landslides, mass-movement triggered tsunami and their deposits:

• Half-day research cruises in 3 groups on two research vessels
• Acquisition of single channel 3.5 kHz reflection seismic data
• Recovery of short gravity cores
• Cone penetration testing
• Data and sample processing and analyses in the lab

The technical workshop was followed by an expert course on “Presentation Skills for Scientists” by Samuel Lagier (SamSpeaksScience.com), a member of the Catalyst group (thecatalyst.ch), before the ESRs worked on short group presentations to present their results of the technical workshop at the end of the week. A second expert course by Robbie l’Anson Price (Catalyst group) tackled the important topic of science communication and public outreach projects.

As usual, ESR students presented and discussed their preliminary research in talks and during a poster session and held their semi-annual Personal Training and Career Development Committee (PDPC) meetings with their main and co-supervisors.

Public lectures were given by Alexander Puzrin from the ETH Zurich and Flavio Ansemetti (University of Bern), who provided valuable background information on shear band propagation within submarine landslides as well as the state of tsunami research on Swiss lakes, respectively.