Rock-slope failure following Late Pleistocene deglaciation on tectonically stable mountainous terrain

The need to develop a national map that characterises landslides across Great Britain has long been recognised by the British Geological Survey as part of its strategic role providing hazard information to stakeholders. Hierarchical landslide domains represent areas of similar physiographic, meteorological, climatic and geological characteristics that shaped the style of landsliding. Developed to underpin current research into how different types of landslides and terrains will be affected by changing environmental conditions, the map further assists development of a national landslide susceptibility map with conditioning factors tailored to a specific domain. This paper considers the role of national-scale land systems mapping to create a Landslide Domain Map, the refinement of a national model using landslide inventories to better reflect the spatial extent and characteristics of landslides within domains. The distribution of landsliding in Great Britain is a product of the complex range of lithologies and geomorphological processes active under a range of climatic conditions. The domains represent landslides across a series of unstable slopes ranging from very large, ancient landslides formed under periglacial climate conditions to small, modern failures, particularly along transport infrastructure corridors. Although analysis of the National Landslide Database broadly informed the nature of landsliding within a specific domain, expert knowledge was needed to supplement it especially in areas where recent mapping had not taken place. Targeted data collection is planned in data-poor domains to supplement the database. Further domain-specific research is ongoing and includes development of semi-empirical process-specific models involving the weighting of critical factors in order to refine the current national landslide susceptibility map, GeoSure. As an example of this refinement, this paper discusses an improved debris flow model for the Scottish Highlands.

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“…This sub-division is supported by observational data (e.g. Ballantyne 2004;Ballantyne et al 2014;Jarman 2006;Strachan 2015).…”

Section: Refining the National Landslide Susceptibility Map Using Domsupporting

confidence: 71%

Creation of a National Landslide Domain Map to Aid Susceptibility Mapping in Great Britain

Dashwood

Pennington

Bee

et al. 2017

Advancing Culture of Living With Landslides

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“…McColl (2012) gives an extensive review of such paraglacial rock-slope instability. Ballantyne and Stone (2013) dated 47 rockslope failures in the Scottish Highlands and reported enhanced incidence immediately after deglaciation, decreasing to a more or less constant rate that has been maintained during the past c. 10 kyr (see also Ballantyne et al, 2014). showed that c. 80 % of rock-slope failures mapped in a 1011 km² alpine study area were located below the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) trimline.…”

Section: Accepted Manuscript [Type Here] [Type Here]mentioning

confidence: 99%

Short-term geomorphological evolution of proglacial systems

2017

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Proglacial systems are amongst the most rapidly changing landscapes on Earth, as glacier mass loss, permafrost degradation and more episodes of intense rainfall progress with climate change. This review addresses the urgent need to quantitatively define proglacial systems not only in terms of spatial extent but also in terms of functional processes. It firstly provides a critical appraisal of prevailing conceptual models of proglacial systems, and uses this to justify compiling data on rates of landform change in terms of planform, horizontal motion, elevation changes and sediment budgets. These data permit us to produce novel summary conceptual diagrams that consider proglacial landscape evolution in terms of a balance of longitudinal and lateral water and sediment fluxes. Throughout, we give examples of newly emerging datasets and data processing methods because these have the potential to assist with the issues of: (i) a lack of knowledge of proglacial systems within high-mountain, arctic and polar regions, (ii) considerable inter-and intracatchment variability in the geomorphology and functioning of proglacial systems, (iii) problems with the magnitude of short-term geomorphological changes being at the threshold of detection, (iv) separating short-term variability from longer-term trends, and (v) of the representativeness of plot-scale field measurements for regionalisation and for upscaling. We consider that understanding of future climate change effects on proglacial systems requires holistic process-based modelling to explicitly consider feedbacks and linkages, especially between hillslope and valley-floor components.Such modelling must be informed by a new generation of repeated distributed topographic surveys to detect and quantify short-term geomorphological changes.

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“…The retreat of the late Pleistocene glaciers has played an important part in preconditioning numerous landslides in mountain valleys (Ballantyne et al 2014a). By applying various dating techniques it has been demonstrated for the Central Alps that the majority of dated landslides were not released immediately after the end of the last glaciation but a few thousand years later, during the Lateglacial and Holocene (Heuberger 1994;Ivy-Ochs et al 1998, 2009Poschinger 2002;Gruner 2006;Prager et al 2007Prager et al , 2008.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Chironico landslide (Valle Leventina, southern Swiss Alps): age and evolution

et al. 2014

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In this study, we focus on the postglacial Chironico landslide in Valle Leventina, the valley of the Ticino river immediately south of the Gotthard pass (southern Swiss Alps). At Chironico, 530 million m 3 of granite gneiss detached from the eastern wall of Valle Leventina and slid along valley-ward dipping foliation joints and fractures. The slide mass was deposited into the valley bottom and blocked the Ticino river, as well as a tributary, the Ticinetto stream, on the opposite side of the valley. Wood fragments found in lacustrine sediments in the slide-dammed upstream lake were previously dated, yielding a minimum age for the landslide of approximately 13,500 cal years BP. Based on the deposit morphology, the landslide was in the past interpreted as being composed of two events. In order to directly date the landslide, ten boulders were dated using the cosmogenic nuclides 10 Be and 36 Cl. Mean exposure ages indicate that the landslide occurred at 13.38 ± 1.03 ka BP, during the Bølling-Allerød interstadial. This implies that the Chironico landslide, one of the few pre-Holocene slides known in Alps, is also the oldest in crystalline rock. With runout modelling using DAN3D we could reproduce the hypothesized singleevent failure scenario, as well as the character and extent of motion of the landslide mass. Both the ages and the modelling suggest that the landslide was released in one event around 3,000 years following deglaciation.

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Rock-slope failure following Late Pleistocene deglaciation on tectonically stable mountainous terrain

Cited by 165 publications

References 112 publications

Creation of a National Landslide Domain Map to Aid Susceptibility Mapping in Great Britain

Creation of a National Landslide Domain Map to Aid Susceptibility Mapping in Great Britain

Short-term geomorphological evolution of proglacial systems

The Chironico landslide (Valle Leventina, southern Swiss Alps): age and evolution

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