Landslides and Quaternary climate changes—The state of the art

Abstract

Climatic factors are considered major causes and triggers of slope instability, but the palaeoclimatic implications of landslides have not yet been systematically reviewed. As inferred from landslides dated to the Late Glacial and Holocene, glacial-interglacial transitions are the major intervals of enhanced landsliding, but the length of this interval varies between distinct types of landscapes. Mass movements in non-glaciated temperate mountain ranges, arid and tropical regions, and coastal areas intensified soon after the onset of the Holocene alongside the warming and wetting of the climate, whereas large rock slides in areas within the limits of Pleistocene glaciations mostly show a millennial-scale time lag with respect to glacier withdrawal. Although the incidence of landslides was ubiquitous throughout the Holocene, the mid- to late-Holocene transition (~5–4 ka) was especially favourable for the origin of landslides across distinct types of landscapes, indicating a strengthened role of mass movements during the culmination phases of interglacial climate optima. In addition, growing evidence suggests that the enhanced activity of landslides occurred during warmer interstadial conditions, which is best demonstrated in the temporal coincidence of arid-zone landslides with Quaternary “pluvials”. Future progress in the understanding of the relationships between landslides and Quaternary climate changes should benefit from the i) extension of datasets of dated landslides, ii) geographical expansion of dating studies to regions with a lack of chronologically determined landslides (e.g., tropics), iii) improvement of landslide-dating strategies involving the incorporation of independent palaeoclimatic proxies and iv) wider incorporation of numerical modeling within landslide-dating studies.