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Geologic controls of slow-moving landslides near the US West Coast

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A Correction to this article was published on 21 December 2021

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Abstract

Slow-moving landslides, often with nearly imperceptible creeping motion, are an important landscape shaper and a dangerous natural hazard across the globe, yet their spatial distribution and geologic controls are still poorly known owing to a paucity of detailed, large-area observations. Here, we use interferometry of L-band satellite radar images to reveal 617 spatially large (4 \(\times\) 104–13 \(\times\) 106 m2) and presently active (2007–2019) slow-moving landslides near the populous US West Coast (only 4.6% of these slides were previously known) and provide evidence for their fundamental controls by bedrock lithology and vertical land motion. We found that slow-moving landslides are generally larger and more spatially frequent in homogeneous bedrock with low rock strength, and they are preferentially located on hillslopes with geologically recent uplift. Notably, landslide size and spatial density in the relatively weak metamorphic rocks and mélange (due to pervasive tectonically sheared discontinuities, foliation, and abundant clay minerals) were two times larger than those in sedimentary and igneous rocks, and the hillslopes with landslides were found to be uplifting approximately three times faster than the average for the whole region. These results suggest that slow-moving landslides can be effectively uncovered by satellite radar imagery and their occurrence and character may be anticipated from vertical land uplift and bedrock lithology. Hence, our study provides understanding critical for reducing landslide hazards and quantifying landslide impacts on landscape change.

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Data and materials availability

The ALOS PALSAR data are freely accessible from the Alaska Satellite Facility (https://asf.alaska.edu/), and the ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 data are obtainable from Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (https://auig2.jaxa.jp/). The 10-m-resolution DEMs covering the US West Coast states are freely available from the US Geological Survey (http://usgs.gov/NationalMap/data/), and the high-resolution true color images are available from Google Earth. Shapefiles of towns and state boundaries of the US West Coast states are downloadable from the US Census Bureau (https://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/geo/shapefiles/). The State Geologic Map Compilation (SGMC) geodatabase of the conterminous United States is available from the US Geological Survey (USGS 2020a). The PRISM precipitation data are freely available from the PRISM Climate Group (https://prism.oregonstate.edu/). Shapefiles depicting landslides identified during this study are available from the US Geological Survey ScienceBase repository (Xu et al. 2020a).

Change history

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency for acquiring the ALOS PALSAR and ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 images, and we thank the 3D Elevation Program Group of the US Geological Survey (USGS) for producing and making available the 10-m-resolution DEMs. We also thank the authors listed in Table 1 for the uplift data.

Funding

This study was funded by NASA Interdisciplinary Research (IDS) in Earth Science Program (80NSSC17K0022), NASA Earth Surface and Interior Focus Area (80NSSC19K1317), NASA Science Team (80NSSC19K1491), and the USGS Landslide Hazards Program. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the US Government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, 75205, USA

    Yuankun Xu, Zhong Lu & Jinwoo Kim

  2. U.S. Geological Survey, Golden, CO, 80401, USA

    William H. Schulz & Kelli Baxstrom

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  1. Yuankun Xu
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Correspondence to Yuankun Xu.

Additional information

The original online version of this article was revised: The authors regret that they need to make some corrections in their original article. The corrections are listed below:

(1) The family name of a co-author was spelled incorrectly. Please change “Kelli Baxtrom” to “Kelli Baxstrom”. The “s” was missing.

(2) One of the funding numbers was wrong. The correct fundings with funding numbers: This study was funded by NASA Interdisciplinary Research (IDS) in Earth Science Program (80NSSC17K0022), NASA Earth Surface and Interior Focus Area (80NSSC19K1317), NASA Science Team (80NSSC19K1491), and the USGS Landslide Hazards Program.

(3) Three minor corrections in the main body of the paper.• “operator that drops whole phase cycles (2π)” below equation (1) —> the symbol “π” looks not correct.• “SAR interferograms using the minimum cost flow approach (Costantini 1998) using the GAMMA software” —> change the first “using” to “through”.• “We processed 6589 scenes of ascending ALOS PALSAR (Advanced Land Observation Satellite–Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar)” —> delete the spelled-out name of ALOS PALSAR there, because it has been introduced in the “SAR interferogram generation and unwrapping” section earlier.

The original article has been corrected.

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Xu, Y., Schulz, W.H., Lu, Z. et al. Geologic controls of slow-moving landslides near the US West Coast. Landslides 18, 3353–3365 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-021-01732-3

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