Landslides triggered by the 1994 Northridge, California, earthquake

Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America
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Abstract

The 17 January 1994 Northridge, California, earthquake (Mw = 6.7) triggered more than 11,000 landslides over an area of about 10,000 km2. Most of the landslides were concentrated in a 1000-km2 area that included the Santa Susana Mountains and the mountains north of the Santa Clara River valley. We mapped landslides triggered by the earthquake in the field and from 1:60,000-nominal-scale aerial photography provided by the U.S. Air Force and taken the morning of the earthquake; these mapped landslides were subsequently digitized and plotted in a GIS-based format. Most of the triggered landslides were shallow (1- to 5-m thick), highly disrupted falls and slides within weakly cemented Tertiary to Pleistocene clastic sediment. Average volumes of these types of landslides were less than 1000 m3, but many had volumes exceeding 100,000 m3. The larger disrupted slides commonly had runout paths of more than 50 m, and a few traveled as far as 200 m from the bases of steep parent slopes. Deeper (>5-m thick) rotational slumps and block slides numbered in the tens to perhaps hundreds, a few of which exceeded 100,000 m3 in volume. Most of these were reactivations of previously existing landslides. The largest single landslide triggered by the earthquake was a rotational slump/block slide having a volume of 8 × 106 m3. Analysis of the mapped landslide distribution with respect to variations in (1) landslide susceptibility and (2) strong shaking recorded by hundreds of instruments will form the basis of a seismic landslide hazard analysis of the Los Angeles area.

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Publication type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Title Landslides triggered by the 1994 Northridge, California, earthquake
Series title Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America
DOI 10.1785/BSSA08601BS319
Volume 86
Issue 1B
Year Published 1996
Language English
Publisher Seismological Society of America
Description 14 p.
First page S319
Last page S332
Country United States
State California
City Northridge
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