Spatio-temporal evolution of post-seismic landslides and debris flows: 2017 Ms 7.0 Jiuzhaigou earthquake

Spatio-temporal evolution of post-seismic landslides and debris flows provides a new perspective to understand post-earthquake evolution of geological environments and landscapes, and to instruct cascaded catastrophic hazard mitigation and post-disaster reconstruction. However, limited earthquake events have been investigated for post-earthquake geohazard evolution. This work reports the geohazard evolution after the 2017 M-s 7.0 Jiuzhaigou earthquake considering the effects of the earthquake, geology, terrain, meteorology, hydrology, and human engineering activity. Some new viewpoints are suggested. (1) Landslide and debris flow activity intensified in the first year following the earthquake under the effects of the antecedent earthquake, precipitation, fault tectonics, human engineering activity, and fluvial networks. (2) Landslide and debris flow activity declined rapidly in the second year as a result of dramatically reduced sediments, declined rainfall, and self-healed slopes. (3) The significant decay of landslide and debris flow activity and the prominent reduction of loose deposits indicate that the geological environment was gradually restoring. (4) Although the hazard effect mitigation and geological environment restoration were ongoing (in the absence of rainstorm events) to attain a new balance, the geoenvironment has not returned to the pre-earthquake level because of widespread unrecovered geohazards and the remaining loose deposits on hillslopes or in channels. (5) The geological environment after the Jiuzhaigou earthquake may re-equilibrate and return to the pre-earthquake level more quickly than after the Kashmir, Chi-Chi, Gorkha, Wenchuan, and Murchison earthquakes. This work provides new knowledge pertaining to geohazard evolution after a strong earthquake and to profound impacts of a catastrophic earthquake on geological environment and landscape.

Automated summary

After the Jiuzhaigou earthquake, landslide and debris flow activity intensified in the first year due to various factors, but declined rapidly in the second year as sediments reduced and slopes self-healed. The geological environment was gradually restoring with the significant decay of landslide and debris flow activity, indicating a new balance was being attained.