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Patterns of Coseismic Landslides in Subduction Zones: Observations From the 2025 M8.8 Kamchatka Peninsula Earthquake and Beyond

Description: 

The July 29, 2025, M8.8 Kamchatka Peninsula earthquake is one of the largest instrumentally recorded earthquakes and generated a series of cascading impacts including a tsunami, coastal land-level change, and landslides. Landslides triggered by great subduction zone earthquakes are of particular concern as they can affect people and infrastructure spread over tens of thousands of square kilometers, but there is a paucity of global empirical data from great subduction zone earthquakes to constrain their behavior and estimate future hazards. Evidence of past landslides in the landscape (i.e. paleo-landslides) may provide clues to past subduction zone earthquake behavior, but the quality of those constraints is limited by our understanding of modern subduction zone earthquake-triggered landslides.

Here we present and discuss landslides generated by the Kamchatka Peninsula earthquake and their relationship to other subduction zone coseismic landslide inventories. Landslides were manually mapped over a ~33,000 km² footprint using Sentinel-2 images comparing most recently-available pre-earthquake images to data from July and August, 2025. 346 landslides, with a total area of ~2.5 km² were mapped on the Kamchatka Peninsula and northern Kuril Islands. Mapped slides strongly cluster along the coast and are biased to the south. This suggests shaking may have been more intense in the south, consistent with the U.S. Geological Survey finite fault model which placed the highest slip patch at the southern end of the rupture. We will discuss the apparent ‘low’ number of mapped landslides relative to other large magnitude events, their distribution as it relates to the earthquake and landscape, and contextualize this event with other subduction and crustal earthquake-triggered landslide inventories. From this case study, we hope to improve our understanding of landslides in subduction zones globally, increasing our ability to forecast future cascading hazards.

Session: Linking Subduction Zone Processes and Cascading Hazards in Alaska, Cascadia, Chile and Beyond - III

Type: Oral

Date: 4/16/2026

Presentation Time: 05:30 PM (local time)

Presenting Author: Alex Grant

Student Presenter: No

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