Exploration of continuous seismic recordings with a machine learning approach to document 20 yr of landslide activity in Alaska

Hibert, Clément; Michéa, David; Provost, Floriane; Malet, Jean‐Philippe; Geertsema, Marten

doi:10.1093/gji/ggz354

Cited by 35 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…These challenges highlight the difficulty of collecting long-term data that are of high and consistent quality. Several previous studies have utilized long-term records generated from satellite imagery (Schlögel et al, 2011;Uhlmann et al, 2013;Bessette-Kirton and Coe, 2016) and seismic data (Hibert et al, 2019) to assess changes to the frequency and magnitude of landslides, but, overall, such records are rare, especially in mountainous cryospheric terrain.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A 36-Year Record of Rock Avalanches in the Saint Elias Mountains of Alaska, With Implications for Future Hazards

Bessette-Kirton

Coe

2020

Front. Earth Sci.

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Glacial retreat and mountain-permafrost degradation resulting from rising global temperatures have the potential to impact the frequency and magnitude of landslides in glaciated environments. Several recent events, including the 2015 Taan Fiord rock avalanche, which triggered a tsunami with one of the highest wave runups ever recorded, have called attention to the hazards posed by landslides in regions like southern Alaska. In the Saint Elias Mountains, the presence of weak sedimentary and metamorphic rocks and active uplift resulting from the collision of the Yakutat and North American tectonic plates create landslide-prone conditions. To differentiate between the typical frequency of landsliding resulting from the geologic and tectonic setting of this region, and landslide processes that may be accelerated due to changes in climate, we used Landsat imagery to create an inventory of rock avalanches in a 3700 km 2 area of the Saint Elias Mountains. During the period from 1984 to 2019, we identified 220 rock avalanches with a mean recurrence interval of 60 days. We compared our landslide inventory with a catalog of M ≥ 4 earthquakes to identify potential coseismic events, but only found three possible earthquake-triggered rock avalanches. We observed a distinct temporal cluster of 41 rock avalanches from 2013 through 2016 that correlated with above average air temperatures (including the three warmest years on record in Alaska, 2014-2016); this cluster was similar to a temporal cluster of recent rock avalanches in nearby Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. The majority of rock avalanches initiated from bedrock ridges in probable permafrost zones, suggesting that ice loss due to permafrost degradation, as opposed to glacial thinning, could be a dominant factor contributing to rock-slope failures in the high elevation areas of the Saint Elias Mountains. Although earthquake-triggered landslides have episodically occurred in southern Alaska, evidence from our study suggests that area-normalized rates of non-coseismic rock avalanches were greater during the period from 1964 to 2019, and that the frequency of these events will continue to increase as the climate continues to warm. These findings highlight the need for hazard assessments in Alaska that address changes in landslide patterns related to climate change.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A 36-Year Record of Rock Avalanches in the Saint Elias Mountains of Alaska, With Implications for Future Hazards

Bessette-Kirton

Coe

2020

Front. Earth Sci.

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“…It is now well known that progressive failure and detachment of unstable masses can generate local ground motions that are equivalent to earthquakes; hence, land-based seismological networks are increasingly used to determine the timing and location of slope failures, particularly in remote settings where repeat topographic surveys are rare or non-existent (e.g. Hibert et al, 2019). Such studies enable identification of many landslides that would otherwise be missing from historical records, thus providing significant improvements in the completeness of hazard catalogues (Ianucci et al, 2020).…”

Section: Passive Geophysical Monitoring Of Terrestrial Landslidesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seismic and Acoustic Monitoring of Submarine Landslides: Ongoing Challenges, Recent Successes and Future Opportunities

Clare¹,

Lintern²,

Pope³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Submarine landslides pose a hazard to coastal communities due to the tsunamis they can generate, and can damage critical seafloor infrastructure, such as the network of cables that underpin global data transfer and communications. These mass movements can be orders of magnitude larger than their onshore equivalents and are found on all of the world’s continental margins; from coastal zones to hadal trenches. Despite their prevalence, and importance to society, offshore monitoring studies have been limited by the largely unpredictable occurrence of submarine landslide and the need to cover large regions of extensive continental margins. Recent subsea monitoring has provided new insights into the preconditioning and run-out of submarine landslides using active geophysical techniques, but these tools only measure a very small spatial footprint, and are power and memory intensive, thus limiting long duration monitoring campaigns. Most landslide events therefore remain entirely unrecorded. Here we first show how passive acoustic and seismologic techniques can record acoustic emissions and ground motions created by terrestrial landslides. We then show how this terrestrial-focused research has catalysed advances in the detection and characterisation of submarine landslides, using both onshore and offshore networks of broadband seismometers, hydrophones and geophones. We then discuss some of the new insights into submarine landslide preconditioning, timing, location, velocity and their down-slope evolution that is arising from these advances. We finally outline some of the outstanding challenges, in particular emphasising the need for calibration of seismic and acoustic signals generated by submarine landslides and their run-out. Once confidence can be enhanced in submarine landslide signal detection and interpretation, passive seismic and acoustic sensing has strong potential to enable more complete hazard catalogues to be built, and opens the door to emerging techniques (such as fibre-optic sensing), to fill key, but outstanding, knowledge gaps concerning these important underwater phenomena.

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“…Dammeier et al 2016;Hibert et al 2017;Provost et al 2017). However, such algorithms have not been applied to systematically locate landslides due to the limited seismic network coverage (Hibert et al 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying landslides from continuous seismic surface waves: a case study of multiple small-scale landslides triggered by Typhoon Talas, 2011

Okuwaki

Fan

Yamada

et al. 2021

Geophysical Journal International

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Summary Landslides can cause devastating damage. In particular, heavy rainfall-triggered landslides pose a chain of natural hazards. However, such events are often difficult to detect, leaving the physical processes poorly understood. Here we apply a novel surface-wave detector to detect and locate landslides during the transit of Typhoon Talas 2011. We identify multiple landslides triggered by Typhoon Talas, including a landslide in the Tenryu Ward, Shizuoka prefecture, Japan, ∼400 km east from the typhoon track. The Tenryu landslide displaced a total volume of 1.2 − −1.5 × 106 m. The landslide is much smaller than those detected by using globally recorded surface waves, yet the event generated coherent seismic signals propagating up to 3000 km away. Our observations show that attributes of small and large landslides may follow the same empirical scaling relationships, indicating possible invariant failure mechanisms. Our results also suggest an alerting technology to detect and locate landslides with a sparse seismic network.

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Exploration of continuous seismic recordings with a machine learning approach to document 20 yr of landslide activity in Alaska

Cited by 35 publications

References 46 publications

A 36-Year Record of Rock Avalanches in the Saint Elias Mountains of Alaska, With Implications for Future Hazards

A 36-Year Record of Rock Avalanches in the Saint Elias Mountains of Alaska, With Implications for Future Hazards

Seismic and Acoustic Monitoring of Submarine Landslides: Ongoing Challenges, Recent Successes and Future Opportunities

Identifying landslides from continuous seismic surface waves: a case study of multiple small-scale landslides triggered by Typhoon Talas, 2011

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