{
  "abstract": "Catastrophic flood traditions occur in many geographically separated cultures, but their possible geological substrates need not be uniform. Existing explanations include river floods, earthquake and volcanic tsunamis, glacial-lake outburst floods, postglacial sea-level rise, and cultural transmission. This paper proposes a complementary, explicitly testable hypothesis: during the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene, deglaciation and associated paraglacial adjustment increased opportunities for catastrophic glacier, ice-rock, and rock-slope failures in many formerly glaciated mountain regions; where such failures entered lakes, fjords, or confined river valleys, they could generate extreme displacement waves, debris-rich floods, secondary damming and outburst floods, and long-lived burial or destruction of valley-floor habitat. Modern analogues demonstrate the required magnitudes. The 2015 Taan Fiord landslide generated 193 m run-up, while the 2020 Elliot Creek rock avalanche produced greater than 100 m run-up before evolving into a destructive outburst flood. A 2026 glacier-associated slope failure in Nepal generated a debris-laden flood that travelled about 100 km, illustrating the continuing relevance of this hazard class, although its detailed mechanism remains under study. Geomythological and ethnographic evidence shows that mass-movement-generated floods can enter cultural memory: a Tlingit account recorded in 1909 explicitly describes an avalanche entering a lake, forcing water out, and overwhelming a settlement. The proposed Deglacial Mass-Movement Flood Tradition (DMFT) hypothesis therefore predicts a non-random association between formerly glaciated mountain settings and narrative features such as sudden onset, extreme local run-up, debris transport, anomalous flow direction, high-ground survival, and permanent loss of inhabited land. The hypothesis is not a claim of a simultaneous worldwide flood. It is a framework for testing whether regionally asynchronous but climatically clustered catastrophic events contributed to a subset of extraordinary flood traditions.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 1,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Tomoyasu Morita"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/582d3582fgecw.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.31223/x53502",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "582d3582fgecw",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/14825/",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "bepress",
      "Earth Sciences"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Geology"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Geomorphology"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Glaciology"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Holocene"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Hydrology"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "debris flood"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "deglaciation"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "flood tradition"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "geomythology"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "ice-rock avalanche"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "landslide tsunami"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "oral tradition"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "paraglacial"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "rock avalanche"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "2308|Landslides and related hazards"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7208832588",
  "pdf_url": "https://eartharxiv.org/repository/object/14825/download/25773/",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-09-05",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/582d3582fgecw.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:17:26Z",
      "native_id": "14825",
      "source": "eartharxiv",
      "url": "https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/14825/"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "earth",
      "origin": "bepress:Geology",
      "subfield": "geology-geochemistry"
    },
    {
      "field": "earth",
      "origin": "bepress:Hydrology",
      "subfield": "hydrology-soils"
    },
    {
      "field": "earth",
      "origin": "bepress:Glaciology",
      "subfield": "oceanography"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Deglacial Mass-Movement Floods as a Potential Source of Catastrophic Flood Traditions: A Testable Geomythological Hypothesis",
  "title_text": "Deglacial Mass-Movement Floods as a Potential Source of Catastrophic Flood Traditions: A Testable Geomythological Hypothesis",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:17:26Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/582d3582fgecw",
  "venue": "EarthArXiv",
  "versions": []
}