Large ground
cracks on a small ridge and landslide in the background after the Nepal quake
of April 2015,
upper Bhote Koshi river valley, photo: O. Marc, GFZ
(August 22, 2015) In mountainous regions earthquakes often
cause strong landslides, which can be exacerbated by heavy rain. However, after
an initial increase, the frequency of these mass wasting events, often enormous
and dangerous, declines, in fact independently of meteorological events and
aftershocks.
These new findings are presented by a German-Franco-Japanese
team of geoscientists in the current issue of the journal Geology, under the
lead of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences. Even after strong
earthquake the activity of landslides returns back over the course of one to
four years to the background level before the earthquake.
The interactions over time between earthquakes and
processing shaping the landscape are still not well understood. The
geoscientists have investigated areas affected by landslides related to four
moderate to severe earthquakes (6.6 to 7.6 on Richter scale). "The main
difficulty was that one must distinguish between the meteorological and the
seismic causes of landsliding. Heavy rain can also produce landslides and can
enhance landsliding after an earthquake", says GFZ scientists Marc Odin,
the lead author of the study. Two processes are interacting here. A strong
earthquake shakes soil layer loose from the underlying bedrock and also damages
the rock below the top soil. Water seeps into the resulting the cracks and
crevices and acts like a lubricating film on which a mountain slope slides into
the valley.