Landslides triggered by the 12 January 2010 Port-au-Prince, Haiti, <i>M</i><sub>w</sub> = 7.0 earthquake: visual interpretation, inventory compiling, and spatial distribution statistical analysis

Abstract

Abstract. The 12 January 2010 Port-au-Prince, Haiti, earthquake (M w = 7.0) triggered tens of thousands of landslides. The purpose of this study is to investigate the correlations of the occurrence of landslides and the thicknesses of their erosion with topographic, geologic, and seismic parameters. A total of 30 828 landslides triggered by the earthquake covered a total area of 15.736 km 2 , distributed in an area more than 3000 km 2 , and the volume of landslide accumulation materials is estimated to be about 29 700 000 m 3 . These landslides are of various types, mostly belonging to shallow disrupted landslides and rock falls, but also include coherent deep-seated landslides and rock slides. These landslides were delineated using pre-and post-earthquake high-resolution satellite images. Spatial distribution maps and contour maps of landslide number density, landslide area percentage, and landslide erosion thickness were constructed in order to analyze the spatial distribution patterns of co-seismic landslides. Statistics of size distribution and morphometric parameters of co-seismic landslides were carried out and were compared with other earthquake events in the world. Four proxies of co-seismic landslide abundance, including landslides centroid number density (LCND), landslide top number density (LTND), landslide area percentage (LAP), and landslide erosion thickness (LET) were used to correlate coseismic landslides with various environmental parameters. These parameters include elevation, slope angle, slope aspect, slope curvature, topographic position, distance from drainages, lithology, distance from the epicenter, distance from the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, distance along the fault, and peak ground acceleration (PGA). A comparison of these impact parameters on co-seismic landslides shows that slope angle is the strongest impact parameter on co-seismic landslide occurrence. Our co-seismic landslide inventory is much more detailed than other inventories in several previous publications. Therefore, we carried out comparisons of inventories of landslides triggered by the Haiti earthquake with other published results and proposed possible reasons for any differences. We suggest that the empirical functions between earthquake magnitude and co-seismic landslides need to be updated on the basis of the abundant and more complete coseismic landslide inventories recently available.

Simple rules to minimise exposure to coseismic landslide hazard

“…Local slope, the gradient of the ground surface measured over some short distance (usually ∼ 1-100 m), has been identified as an important driver of landslide occurrence in almost all prior landslide studies (e.g. Harp et al, 1981;Tibaldi et al, 1995;Keefer, 2000;Wang et al, 2003;Xu et al, 2012Xu et al, , 2014aParker et al, 2017). This is consistent with mechanistic expectations based on the balance of driving and resisting forces on an inclined failure plane (Taylor, 1937).…”

“…The complex rupture involved both a blind thrust fault and deep lateral slip on the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault (Hayes et al, 2010;Mercier de Lépinay et al, 2011). The earthquake triggered more than 30 000 landslides across a 3000 km 2 region (Xu et al, 2014a). We used an inventory of 23 679 landslides mapped by Harp et al (2016) from publicly available satellite imagery with a resolution of 0.6 m before and after the earthquake; landslides with areas > 10 m 2 were resolved (Harp et al, 2017).…”

“…Curvature (e.g. Xu et al, 2014a) is strongly dependent on the length scale over which it is measured and is extremely difficult to estimate by eye, particularly in rough natural topography. Proximity to roads (e.g.…”

Effects of Seismogenic Faults on the Predictive Mapping of Probability to Earthquake-Triggered Landslides

“…Their results showed that the predictive rates of the weight index modeling exceeded 90% when including the factors of the seismogenic fault [21]. Investigations demonstrated significantly different distribution patterns of landslides in different sections of the causative fault of the 2010 Haiti earthquake [26]. Gorum et al suggested that the spatial pattern of co-seismic landslides caused by the 2008 Wenchuan M7.9 earthquake was influenced by style-of-faulting of the Yingxiu-Beichuan fault, which ruptured the huge temblor, implying the segmentation effect of the fault [27].…”

Inventory, Distribution and Geometric Characteristics of Landslides in Baoshan City, Yunnan Province, China

“…In recent years, the Google Earth platform has been widely used in landslide investigation [33,44,45]. Google Earth contains available Landsat imagery (30 m or 15 m pan-sharpened), orthophotos (0.5-2 m), and high-resolution commercial satellite imagery (SPOT, FORMOSAT-2: 0.5-8 m; World View-1 and World View-2, 0.5-2.5 m) [35,46].…”