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Published January 12, 2016 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

Seismology-based early identification of dam-formation landquake events

Abstract

Flooding resulting from the bursting of dams formed by landquake events such as rock avalanches, landslides and debris flows can lead to serious bank erosion and inundation of populated areas near rivers. Seismic waves can be generated by landquake events which can be described as time-dependent forces (unloading/reloading cycles) acting on the Earth. In this study, we conduct inversions of long-period (LP, period ≥20 s) waveforms for the landquake force histories (LFHs) of ten events, which provide quantitative characterization of the initiation, propagation and termination stages of the slope failures. When the results obtained from LP waveforms are analyzed together with high-frequency (HF, 1–3 Hz) seismic signals, we find a relatively strong late-arriving seismic phase (dubbed Dam-forming phase or D-phase) recorded clearly in the HF waveforms at the closest stations, which potentially marks the time when the collapsed masses sliding into river and perhaps even impacting the topographic barrier on the opposite bank. Consequently, our approach to analyzing the LP and HF waveforms developed in this study has a high potential for identifying five dam-forming landquake events (DFLEs) in near real-time using broadband seismic records, which can provide timely warnings of the impending floods to downstream residents.

Additional Information

© 2016 Nature Publishing Group. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received: 30 September 2015; Accepted: 04 December 2015; Published online: 12 January 2016. This research has been supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Taiwan. The authors acknowledge the Central Geological Survey (CGS) for providing data for the collapse areas of the landquake events, the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology Data Management Center (IRIS DMC), the Central Weather Bureau (CWB) of Taiwan, and Academia Sinica, Taiwan, for providing seismic data. The meteorological data was provided by the Water Resource Agency (WRA), Taiwan. Author Contributions: W.-A.C. performed the seismic data processing, waveform inversion and regression analysis, and was responsible for the overall design and operation of this research. L.Z. assisted in implementing the waveform modeling and editing of the manuscript. Y.-M.W. and S.-C.C. participated in the design of the research and were involved in the interpretation of the results. C.-H.C. and H.-H.H. contributed to the data acquisition and interpretation. The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Created:
August 20, 2023
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October 17, 2023