Evaluation of factors controlling large earthquake-induced landslides by the Wenchuan earthquake

Key factors influencing the mechanism of rapid and long runout landslides triggered by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, China

Background: The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake triggered many rapid and long runout landslides, which directly caused great loss of property and human lives and were responsible for a large percentage of total damages caused by the earthquake. It is very important for the purposes of landslide disaster prevention and mitigation to understand the earthquake triggered mechanism of initiation and motion...

Tectonic Background of the Wenchuan Earthquake

Stability and Run-out Analysis of Earthquake-induced Landslides

Optimized volume models of earthquake-triggered landslides

In this study, we proposed three optimized models for calculating the total volume of landslides triggered by the 2008 Wenchuan, China Mw 7.9 earthquake. First, we calculated the volume of each deposit of 1,415 landslides triggered by the quake based on pre- and post-quake DEMs in 20 m resolution. The samples were used to fit the conventional landslide "volume-area" power law relationship and t...

Wenchuan earthquake. A deeply scarred land.

LONGMENSHAN, CHINA—In the morning of 12 May 2008, Ren Diandong gave a talk on landslide modeling at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing. A few hours later, Ren’s model was put to the supreme test: a magnitude-7.9 earthquake in Sichuan Province’s Longmenshan range (Science, 20 June 2008, p. 1578). As early reports came in that afternoon of a d...