“Big earthquakes are inevitable, but consequential disasters are not.”

In the aftermath of the tragic earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, there have been calls to make the buildings safer. But there is also an opportunity to anticipate and mitigate landslides to reduce their impact on people and infrastructure, says Dave Betley.

The tragic pair of earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria on February 6, 2023 caused an appalling loss of life in both countries. As is often the case, a well-known and well-understood natural hazard has turned into a human catastrophe as a result of poor population and infrastructure, and a lack of preparation.

Most of the deaths were the result of building collapses, which occurred at a much higher rate than would be expected for an event of this magnitude. The reasons for this widespread collapse of structures remain unclear but may be a combination of higher-than-expected ground accelerations, inadequate building codes, poor enforcement of agreed-upon standards – which have often been linked to corruption in the past – and unforeseen ground conditions that led to the failure of the foundation.

An additional factor is likely a low level of preparedness in terms of immediate disaster response, meaning that trapped victims who could have been saved were lost, and those injured succumbed to treatable injuries due to a lack of timely medical assistance. While “miraculous” rescues are adored by the media and are a rare source of hope among the miserable, the truth is that most buried survivors are pulled out by locals in the first 24 hours.

There is no doubt that landslides have been an important part of the story, especially in rural areas. They have taken a toll in their own right, blocking roads, and disrupting rescue and recovery operations. In my experience, there is almost always a failure to predict the degree to which landslides disturb mountain environments after an earthquake.

In recent years, there have been many studies on landslide clusters caused by large earthquakes. Inventories of coseismic landslides were created after events in Pakistan, China, New Zealand, Haiti, Chile, USA, Philippines, Taiwan, Mexico and Japan, among others. Studies sought to examine these inventories by themselves and combine them to create cohort analyses. This work is robust and compelling, allowing an understanding of the main controls on landslide distribution.

While extrapolating from one earthquake event to another is difficult, the patterns that emerge from these studies that combine understanding from multiple earthquakes are robust. For example, earthquakes associated with landslide faults usually generate different landslide patterns than earthquakes associated with reverse faulting. In both cases, in the absence of confounding factors such as low-strength land regions, the peak of landslide intensity occurs near the surface expression of the fault, and decreases with distance. But in the case of a sudden slide, this exponential decay with distance tends to be stronger, meaning that most landslides occur over a smaller area. In a reverse fault, a different pattern appears between the two sides of the fault, with much higher densities of landslides on the wall hanging mass. Landslide density on this side of the fault tends to remain elevated for a longer distance than the fault trail.

Similarly, the pattern of landslides in an earthquake is affected by the precipitation conditions. Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that earthquakes that occur in the wet season trigger more landslides than during the dry season. A practical example lies in the Himalayas – a major earthquake during the summer monsoon is more likely to cause many landslides than one in the dry season.

Similarly, following a major earthquake, we know that the first major rainfall event tends to trigger many additional landslides – in some cases the area affected by active landslides has been seen to double. The occurrence of landslides in subsequent rainstorms fades over time, although the period in which this occurs varies from place to place, controlled by factors we do not yet fully understand.

Unfortunately, it is noted that in many parts of the world this improved scientific understanding does not translate into improved preparedness for landslides, or preparedness for slope failures in the months and years following the main shock. Understanding that landslides are likely to congregate cosismally along fault traces should allow for the planning of better mitigation measures in these areas and, of course, for improved response to events in the immediate aftermath of the main shock. In very few places do we see this translation of scientific knowledge into engineering practice, although the benefits of doing so are obvious.

Large earthquakes are inevitable, but consequential disasters are not. We hope that the terrible earthquakes in Turkey and Syria will lead to a redoublement of efforts to make buildings safer, although this is a mantra repeated after every catastrophic earthquake, to variable effects. However, there is also another opportunity to bring the latest knowledge and practices on landslide prediction and mitigation to reduce the vulnerability of people and infrastructure exposed to seismic and post-earthquake slope instability. If we do, the next great natural hazard event may not be a catastrophic disaster.

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