Abstract
Abstract. Large earthquakes in mountainous regions may trigger thousands of landslides, some active for years. We analysed the changes in landslide activity near the epicentre of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake by generating five landslide inventories for different years through stereoscopic digital visual image interpretation. From May 2008 to April 2015, 660 new landslides occurred outside the co-seismic landslide areas. In April 2015, the number of active landslides had gone down to 66, less than 1 % of the co-seismic landslides, but still much higher than the pre-earthquake levels. We expect that the landslide activity will continue to decay, but may be halted if extreme rainfall events occur.
Highlights
Large earthquakes can cause huge losses to human society due to shaking ground, fault rupture, liquefaction, tsunamis, and due to co-seismic landslides that can be triggered in mountainous areas
In areas that have been affected by such large earthquakes, the threat of landslides persists in the years following the earthquake because huge amounts of deposits loosened by the earthquake on hillslopes provide sufficient source material for landslide reactivation and debris flow occurrence during heavy rainstorms
By digitizing post-seismic landslides based on the co-seismic landslide inventory, the landslide boundaries were kept consistent, minimizing the errors caused by image quality
Summary
Large earthquakes can cause huge losses to human society due to shaking ground, fault rupture, liquefaction, tsunamis, and due to co-seismic landslides that can be triggered in mountainous areas. Some significant examples are the debris flows that destroyed part of the town of Beichuan on 24 September 2008, the debris flow that dammed the Min River on 13 August 2010, and the debris flow that damaged the village of Qipangou on 10 July 2013 (Tang et al, 2009; Xu et al, 2012) These post-earthquake mass movements highlighted the need for more research to provide critical information for assessing post-earthquake landslide hazards as a basis for reconstruction planning in earthquake-affected mountainous areas. For the Wenchuan earthquake area, some researchers have studied the short-term (within 3 years) changes in landslide reactivation after storms (Tang et al, 2011; Wang et al, 2014). The objective of this research is to analyse the changes in landslide activity after the Wenchuan earthquake based on detailed landslide inventory maps generated from seven highresolution images from 2005 to 2015 in order to contribute to the long-term monitoring of post-earthquake landslide activity
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