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Lookup NU author(s): Dr David MilledgeORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Copyright © 2025 Katy Burrows et al.Earthquake-triggered landslides can be mapped using optical satellite images, but assessing how they evolve during earthquake sequences is difficult due to cloud cover in these data. This information is crucial for understanding their triggering conditions. Here we use Sentinel-1 amplitude and a new, coherence-based method to characterise the evolution of rapid landslides during an earthquake sequence that occurred over a 23 d period in 2018 in Lombok, Indonesia. While most new landslides were triggered during the largest earthquake in the sequence on 5 August, we also identified landslide activity associated with other, lower magnitude earthquakes on 28 July, 9 and 19 August, with around half of the landslides studied active in more than one earthquake. In particular, many landslides triggered by the 5 August earthquake were then reactivated later in the sequence. These reactivations were triggered by accelerations as weak as 0.1 g, while new failures generally did not occur below 0.15 g, suggesting a post-seismic weakening effect driven by the landslides themselves rather than general landscape weakening. We also identified an example where possible precursory motion detected during the first earthquake in the sequence was later followed by larger scale failure. Overall, we demonstrate that, although they are not sensitive to all landslides and are more likely to detect larger events, Sentinel-1 amplitude and coherence are valuable tools to study how landslide hazard and mass wasting evolve during sequences of triggers.
Author(s): Burrows K, Milledge DG, Ferrario MF
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Earth Surface Dynamics
Year: 2025
Volume: 13
Issue: 5
Pages: 1039-1057
Online publication date: 21/10/2025
Acceptance date: 01/09/2025
Date deposited: 10/11/2025
ISSN (print): 2196-6311
ISSN (electronic): 2196-632X
Publisher: Copernicus Publications
URL: https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-13-1039-2025
DOI: 10.5194/esurf-13-1039-2025
Data Access Statement: Sentinel-1 data are available from the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem (https: //dataspace.copernicus.eu, last access: June 2025). The original polygon landslide inventory is available in the supplementary materials of Ferrario (2019). Timing and reactivation information derived from Sentinel-1 for this study are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15516233 (Burrows et al., 2025). Computer codes for deriving landslide timings from SAR amplitude in Google Earth Engine are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6984291 (Burrows, 2022).
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