OSL dating of the massive landslide-damming event in the Jishixia Gorge, on the upper Yellow River, NE Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

Frequent natural hazards cause huge damage to human life and society in the mountainous regions along the eastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau. A massive landslide damming event has been reported in the Jishixia Gorge on the upper Yellow River as it emerges from the NE Tibetan Plateau. It was speculated that a breach of the dammed lake might have resulted in a super flood disaster that ruined the major Neolithic settlement at Lajia (4.20-3.95 ka BP) within the Guanting Basin that is located in the downstream. However, our detailed investigations along the Jishixia Gorge and Guanting Basin indicate that the dammed lake became shallower and desiccated gradually rather than breaching suddenly. The Yellow River has cut into the dammed lake deposits forming well-exposed profiles on the riverbanks. The dammed lake deposits are considered to provide an accurate natural record of the life-span of the dammed lake. Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating was carried out on a series of eight samples taken from the profile. The OSL ages of the dammed lake deposits fall within the range of 8.25 ± 0.39 to 5.65 ± 0.21 ka at the Yisiri site about 2.5 km upstream of the landslide dam. These results indicate that the massive landslide damming event and the corresponding dammed lake occurred at 8.25 ka in the early Holocene. The dammed lake existed for about 2600 years and desiccated gradually and disappeared at 5.65 ka because the landslide dam was dissected slowly by the Yellow River. This means that the landslide dammed lake on the Yellow River disappeared about 1700 years before the Neolithic settlement at Lajia became ruins. The landslide damming event in the Jishixia Gorge is not related to the prehistorical catastrophic disasters that overcame the Lajia settlement within the Guanting Basin.

Mass‐Wasting‐Inferred Dramatic Variability of 130,000‐Year Indian Summer Monsoon Intensity From Deposits in the Southeast Tibetan Plateau

“…Field surveys identified large‐scale mass‐wasting deposits including 25 landslides (volumes larger than 1,000,000 m 3 ), two debris flows (catchment areas larger than 10 km 2 ), and three lacustrine deposits (distribution areas larger than 1,000 m 2 ) along Jinsha River and its branch, Dingqu River, both of which have perennial flow (Figure 1b, Text S1, Figures S2–S4, and Table S1 in Supporting Information ). All deposits were collected by hammering stainless steel tubes into a cleaned face and immediately sealing and taping the tubes with aluminum foil to avoid light exposure and water loss (Xu et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2015).…”

Retrospective Modeling of a Large Paleo-Landslide Related to Deglaciation in the Sierra de Urbión, Cordillera Ibérica, Spain

“…Their formation is usually previous to the generation of large landslides [4][5][6]. If these landslides originated natural dams and lakes upstream, the dating of these lake sediments can be used to assess the risk of flooding due to the collapse of these dams [7], or for paleoclimatic investigations and geomorphological evolution studies, such as improving the information on deglaciation in mountain areas (for example, in the Pyrenees [8]).…”

Climate and tectonic effects on Holocene development of an alpine lake (Muge Co, SE margin of Tibet)

“…In tectonically active mountainous regions, landslides may be one of the important factors resulting in the formation of lakes, for example, in New Zealand (Adams, 1981) and Himalayas (Anoop et al, 2012). In the mountainous region along the NE Tibetan Plateau, a massive landslide caused damming events and corresponding development of dammed lakes occurred at around 8.2 kyr BP (Zhang et al, 2015). At the same time, landslides may also cause changes in lake bathymetry (Jacoby et al, 1992), increase catchment erosion and sediment accumulation rates (Brancelj et al, 2002), and cause turbidity flows (Karlin and Abella, 1992), that lead to changes in ecological community composition and local sedimentation.…”