The preliminary inventory of coseismic ground failures related to December 2020 – January 2021 Petrinja earthquake series

Abstract

The most recent major earthquake series struck near Petrinja (December 29th 2020 M 6.2), and triggered extensive ground failures in the wider area of Petrinja, Sisak and Glina. Coseismic ground failures including subsidence dolines, liquefaction and landslides have been documented over a large area by various experts and teams. These data are stored in the newly created inventory, which is openly presented in this paper. This inventory is administered and updated by the Croatian Geological Survey, and will be available online via a Web Map Service (WMS) (www.hgi-cgs.hr). The aim of the inventory is to not only provide data for the development of susceptibility maps and more detailed exploration for possible remediation measures, but also to define the priorities for immediate action. The earthquake triggered the rapid development of dropout dolines which endanger the local populations of the villages of Mečenčani and Borojevići. This is still an ongoing process in the vicinity of the houses and therefore in-situ exploration started immediately. Liquefaction related to alluvial sediments of the Sava, Kupa and Glina rivers occurred almost exclusively in loose and pure sands, and was accompanied by sand boils, subsidence and lateral spreading. Liquefaction also presents a greater hazard because settlement of houses and river embankments occurred. Lateral spreading caused failures of river flood embankments and natural river banks. According to the data known to date, the majority of the coseismic landslides were reactivated with minor displacements. Despite that, it has been recognised that houses at the edge, or in landslide colluvium suffered greater damage than other houses located outside the landslide impact zone.

The Largest Geodetic Coseismic Assessment of the 2020 Mw = 6.4 Petrinja Earthquake

“…The earthquake in Petrinja has been the subject of multiple research studies. Some have focused on fault ruptures and sinkholes [9,10,13,14,16,[22][23][24], while others have examined its effects on buildings and the economy [11,12,17,25]. A lot of the previous research has focused on techniques such as Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) [7,21,[26][27][28][29] and the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) [8,15,30].…”

“…Croatia lies in a seismically active region of the central Mediterranean, a well-known compressional area, which is represented by four geotectonic units on the coastal area spreading from the Eastern Alps and Dinarides to the Adriatic microplate and the Pannonian basin unit on the continent [15,22,29]. The Adriatic microplate is the greatest source of tectonic activity in the south-central area of Europe [31].…”