Earthquakes cause landslides. Can landslides cause earthquakes as well? | Science

Southern Taiwan was hit by thousands of landslides after Typhoon Morakot in 2009.

Baraka / Reuters / Newscom

Written by Katherine Corneille Gul. 2, 2020, 5:00 am

When the deadliest typhoon that struck Taiwan in modern history hit the island in 2009, it threw 3 meters of rain in many days, causing thousands of landslides. What surprised scientists, however, is the number of earthquakes that followed the landmass of the Hurricane Morakot. Now, a new study indicates the cause of their occurrence: landslides have removed so much soil and rocks that the Earth’s newly lightened crust has faded in new ways.

“In previous cases, only most people considered that earthquakes could lead to landslides,” says Zhejiang Ping, an earthquake expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was not involved in the research.

Nearly 10,000 landslides struck Taiwan in the days following Typhoon Morakot, causing 1.2 km3 of soil and rocks to rise below the hills. Over time, rivers carried many debris away. This permanently erased the landscape of hundreds of millions of tons of sediment, the equivalent of removing 3 centimeters from the entire surface of Taiwan, says Philippe Steer, a geologist at the University of Rennes 1 in France.

Steer and his colleagues assumed that this tectonic shift affected seismic activity, so they mining a catalog of more than 340,000 earthquakes in Taiwan between 1995 and 2015. In areas affected by the landslides related to Typhoon Morakot, researchers found a three-fold increase in the rate of earthquake that The storm immediately followed, they reported today in scientific reports. They also found an increase in the rate of small earthquakes after the storm. The team noted that seismic activity in these areas remained above normal for about 2.5 years.

They say the increase could be explained by removing hundreds of millions of tons of sediment, which likely caused the Earth’s crust to bend near Taiwan slightly upward. The researchers believed that this movement would have changed pressure within the cortex, which could have been non-tolerable errors that were already close to the point of rupture.

Peng says this makes sense. “It is not the landslide itself. The subsequent wear process generates stress.”

This is not the first time that researchers have linked erosion to earthquake behavior. In 2010, scientists suggested that the trend for major earthquakes in the new Madrid region in the central United States is due to thousands of years of erosion caused by the Mississippi River. Peng says no other recent cases of earthquakes caused by erosion have been documented, but Haiti and Puerto Rico will be good places to research, because these countries are often hit by hurricanes and see a lot of landslides.

“It is very rare for you to be able to notice these types of changes,” Steer says. But because climate change can lead to more frequent extremist events, there may be more erosion – and therefore earthquakes – in our future.

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