Deaths caused by landslides in earthquakes

A new study (Sun et al. 2026) shows that in six earthquakes in China between 2010 and 2022, landslides and rockslides were responsible for at least half of the total deaths.

It is well established that landslides are a major cause of loss of life in earthquakes in mountainous areas. The seismology adage that “it’s not earthquakes that kill people, it’s collapsing buildings” does not apply in its pure form to mountains – landslides also kill large numbers of people.

An earthquake triggered a landslide from the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake.

However, the actual number of people killed by landslides in earthquakes is not well understood. This is largely due to the challenges of gathering reliable information in the aftermath of a major earthquake, when the focus is on rescue and recovery rather than data collection. For this reason, many studies of landslide fatalities do not include events caused by earthquakes. This is true for my own work.

However, a study has just been published (Sun et al. 2026) in the journal Natural Hazards Review that begins to address this issue. This paper nominally looks at all-cause deaths from earthquakes in China from 2001 to 2022. However, the authors note that the data have low reliability up to 2010, so I will focus on the period 2010 to 2022. I also note that the authors use the term “geological hazards,” which is slightly broader than landslides. I should note that this paper takes a broad look at earthquake fatalities – there is a much richer range of analyzes than I will cover here.

From 2010 to 2022, Sun et al. (2026) identified 14 earthquakes in which geological hazards caused loss of life. In some cases, the effects were significant. Thus, the 3 August 2014 earthquake in Ludian, Yunnan, resulted in 134 deaths and 40 people missing due to geological hazards out of a total of 728 deaths (~24% of the total), while the 5 September 2022 earthquake in Luoding, Sichuan, resulted in 76 deaths due to geohazards and 25 missing out of a total of 118 deaths (~86%). of the total). In six of the 14 examples, geological hazards caused at least 50% of the deaths.

Sun et al. (2026) highlight that “deaths caused by geological hazards are concentrated in geologically complex mountainous provinces, such as Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu, Guangxi and Guizhou”. They point out that even small events can trigger deadly landslides – for example, six people were killed in a rockslide triggered by a magnitude M = 4.3 earthquake in Guizhou in 2010, while a magnitude M = 2.8 aftershock from the Yanjin earthquake in 2006 caused a rockfall that killed one person.

This is an incredibly useful study. It begins to shed light on the impact of landslides in large earthquakes. It’s not the final study, and questions remain – particularly the pattern of landslide losses in large earthquakes, such as the Wenchuan event in 2010, where landslides were ferocious. But they form the basis for such investigations, beginning to fill significant gaps in our understanding.

reference

Sun, B. et al. 2026. Analysis of causes of earthquake-related deaths in mainland China 2001-2022. Natural Hazards Review, 27 [2]. https://doi-org.ntu.idm.oclc.org/10.1061/NHREFO.NHENG-2458

Text © 2026. The Authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 Unless otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission of the copyright owner is prohibited.

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