On August 19th, Prof. Gary Parker from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S., visited the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR) and presented a seminar on “Morphodynamics of hanging ice dams: interaction between flow, sediment, frazil ice and a solid ice roof, and application to the Yellow River near the Hequ Gaging Station” at IWHR Global Vision Forum. Prof. Hongling Shi, Deputy Division Chief of the International Research and Training Center on Erosion and Sedimentation (IRTCES), hosted the seminar. Approximately 100 participants attended, including experts and graduate students from IRTCES and IWHR, as well as other scholars who joined the event online.

    In his presentation, Gary Parker emphasized that hanging ice dams drive river flow downward, thereby scouring holes in the sand bed. Such scouring endangers infrastructure like bridge piers and buried pipelines. Currently, research on how hanging ice dams affect riverbed evolution is insufficient, with relatively few relevant findings. The report elaborated on the physical mechanism of hanging ice dam formation in rivers, incorporating the transport mechanism of suspended frazil ice and the evolution mechanism of hanging ice dams. It also derived and established a governing equation accounting for the transport, deposition, and erosion of frazil ice, simulated the formation processes of hanging ice dams and scour holes, and applied the work to a field case on the Yellow River at the Hequ gaging station.

    During the Q&A session, participating experts and scholars discussed the hydro-sediment-ice dynamic mechanism in rivers with hanging ice dams, along with relevant models and application cases. They agreed that this research expands the scope of traditional riverbed evolution studies— which only focus on hydro-sediment dynamics—by integrating hydro-sediment-ice dynamic processes. More importantly, it holds crucial guiding significance for disaster prevention and mitigation in cold-region rivers.