Abstract
Earthquakes in mountainous areas may produce many landslides that involve abundant snow, but few observations have been made of these hazardous phenomena. The 12 March 2011 north Nagano Prefecture earthquake (MJMA 6.7) occurred in a mountainous part of Japan that typically has an annual snow cover of more than 2 m, and it induced many snowy landslides. Some of these traveled relatively long distances. We examined the snowy Tatsunokuchi landslide to reconstruct the landsliding processes over deep snow. We infer that the Tatsunokuchi landslide occurred by collapse of a rock debris mass of 5 × 104 m3 that plunged into the abundant snow, forming a mixture of snow and rock debris, which then traveled on top of the snow. Later, the displaced mass included a large amount of snow which was pushed forward at the front and to the sides. The velocity of the landslide was estimated to be approximately 14 m/s. It appears that the displaced mass, having only a small proportion of rock debris, had a low enough density to travel easily on top of the snow. Our observations suggest that there was much liquid water at the base of the displaced mass shortly after the event. Our results suggest that landslides may damage wider areas than expected if they travel over deep snow.
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Acknowledgments
Oblique aerial photographs were provided by the Niigata and Nagano prefectural governments with the assistance of Mitsuhiro Tsuboya of the Niigata Prefectural Government and Masayuki Miyasaka of the Nagano Prefectural Government. Topographic data before the event was provided by Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Hokuriku Regional Development Bureau. Masahiro Chigira, Sumio Matsuura, Yuki Matsushi, and Masahiro Kurogi of the Disaster Prevention Research Institute of Kyoto University helped us with the field survey and provided helpful comments. Hiroshi Suwa provided useful information for calculating landslide velocity. This work was supported by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (grant no. 24656281 to Satoshi Yamashita). Finally, reviewers Demian Schneider and Mauri McSaveney gave us useful and helpful suggestions to improve the paper.
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Yamasaki, S., Nagata, H. & Kawaguchi, T. Long-traveling landslides in deep snow conditions induced by the 2011 Nagano Prefecture earthquake, Japan. Landslides 11, 605–613 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-013-0419-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-013-0419-z