Baja quake in 2010 generated hundreds of landslides

The 2010 Cucapah earthquake in Baja California, triggered hundreds of landslides that sent up dust clouds all along the mountain range.

David Petley, who writes the Landslide Blog, and his colleagues used remote sensing data and  quantified the number (452)  and volume of landslides (2.6 million cubic meters) in the Cucapah Mountains as a direct result of the April 2010, M7.2 earthquake.  Their study is published in the journal Geomorphology


In his blog post, David noted that steep slopes generated more landslides, "But interestingly, we also found that there was a strong influence exerted by slope orientation.  In particular, those slopes orientated perpendicular to the fault were four times more likely to fail than those orientated parallel to the fault.  The reasons for this are not clear at present."

Reference:

Barlow, J., Barisin, I., Rosser, N., Petley, D.,  Densmore, A. and Wright, T. 2014. Seismically-induced mass movements and volumetric fluxes resulting from the 2010 Mw = 7.2 earthquake in the Sierra Cucapah, Mexico, Geomorphology, Available online 24 November 2014, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2014.11.012.