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Surface recovery of landslides triggered by 2008 Ms8.0 Wenchuan earthquake (China): a case study in a typical mountainous watershed

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Abstract

The Ms8.0 Wenchuan earthquake that occurred on 12 May 2008 in southwestern China and triggered numerous landslides is one of the stronger ones in the steep eastern margins of the Tibetan Plateau. The surfaces of these landslides have recovered gradually with vegetation, which provide useful information about the evolution of geologic environment as well as the long-term assessment of landslides after earthquake. The Mianyuanhe watershed shows many co-seismic landslides. The active fault passing through its center is selected as a study area aiming to analyze the annual surface recovery rate (SRR) of landslides by interpretation of remote-sensing images in five periods from 2008 to 2013. The results are here described. (1) Although a large amount of loose deposits were transformed into debris flows, the surfaces of the landslides recovered rapidly with vegetation and almost no landslides occurred at new sites after the Wenchuan earthquake. In the year 2008, the exposed surface projected area (ESPA) of the landslides showed a total area of 56.3 km2 and covered 28.9 % of the study area, which was reduced rapidly to 19.1 % in 2011 and 15.8 % in 2013. (2) The study area was divided into four geologic units, including clastic rocks, melange zone, carbonate rocks, and magmatic rocks. Smaller ESPAs and higher SRRs were found in the former two units versus the latter ones. (3) A single large landslide shows an SRR lower than a group of smaller ones having an equal total surface, while the SRRs of debris flows are lower than those of rockfalls and landslides. (4) The vegetation cover would return to the pre-earthquake level in 2020 approximately, which indicates that the impact of the Wenchuan earthquake on landslides and debris-flows activities would cease almost completely.

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Acknowledgments

This research is supported by the Project of the 12th Five-year National Sci-Tech Support Plan of China (2011BAK12B09) and China Geological Survey (1212010914025, 1212011014033). We are grateful to Yu Kai and Wang Zongsheng for their help during field investigations. Special thanks to Wang Pengfei and Long Wei for their valuable suggestions for completing this task. We are thankful to editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments which greatly helped to improve the original manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geomechanics, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, Beijing, 100081, People’s Republic of China

    Lingjing Li, Xin Yao, Yongshuang Zhang & Nengjuan Zhou

  2. Key Laboratory of Neotectonic Movement and Geohazard, MLR, Beijing, 100081, People’s Republic of China

    Lingjing Li, Xin Yao, Yongshuang Zhang & Nengjuan Zhou

  3. College of Engineering and Technology, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, 100083, People’s Republic of China

    Lingjing Li & Jian Chen

  4. Department of Earth Sciences, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Abbottabad, Pakistan

    Javed Iqbal

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  1. Lingjing Li
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  2. Xin Yao
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  3. Yongshuang Zhang
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  4. Javed Iqbal
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  5. Jian Chen
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  6. Nengjuan Zhou
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Correspondence to Xin Yao.

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Li, L., Yao, X., Zhang, Y. et al. Surface recovery of landslides triggered by 2008 Ms8.0 Wenchuan earthquake (China): a case study in a typical mountainous watershed. Landslides 13, 787–794 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-015-0594-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-015-0594-1

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