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Understanding the Relationships Between Seismic Parameters and Landslide Characteristics From the Exotic Seismic Events Catalog

Description: 

The relationship between the behaviors of landslides and how they relate to the resulting seismic signals is still partially unknown, which poses challenges in monitoring and early-warning efforts. This knowledge gap can be attributed to difficulties in directly measuring landslide parameters and a lack, until recently, of systematic cataloging these parameters and seismic characteristics for the wide variety of landslide styles that can occur. Identifying relationships between seismic signals and physical properties is therefore crucial to better understanding mass-wasting events.
To investigate these relationships, we select mass movement events from the Exotic Seismic Events Catalog (ESEC) – a collection of seismogenic landslides that includes properties like runout distance, drop height, and volume. The ESEC, available on IRIS’s product depository or as a SQLite database on USGS ScienceBase, includes more than 240 events that span several continents, providing us with a large dataset for comparison. Unlike previous studies, which focus primarily on one event type and/or one region, we explore parameter relationships for a wider range of failure mechanisms, including avalanches, falls, and flows, and for many regions. We analyze seismic signals in the long-period (LP) range (20-60 sec) and the high-frequency (HF) range (1-5 Hz). To better understand the dynamics of the forces exerted by the flows and their particle impacts, we estimate the force history of large, rapid, events through the inversion of LP signals and compute smoothed HF envelopes using a Hilbert transform. We then derive peak amplitudes, peak forces, and signal duration, along with physical properties from imagery or published values. A comparison of these parameters shows that events with similar failure styles produce similar trends in seismic and physical characteristics. With this new information, estimating event size and runout distance of events from their seismic signals can be improved.

Session: Detecting, Locating, Characterizing and Monitoring Non-earthquake Seismoacoustic Sources [Poster]

Type: Poster

Date: 4/19/2023

Presentation Time: 08:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Elaine Collins

Student Presenter: No

Invited Presentation: 

Authors