The 1786 earthquake-triggered landslide dam and subsequent dam-break flood on the Dadu River, southwestern China

Morphological analysis and features of the landslide dams in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru

“…A sudden dam failure can release a destructive outburst flood, spreading for possibly tens of kilometers downstream (e.g., Casagli and Ermini 1999;Costa and Schuster 1988;Hewitt et al 2008). In the literature, many single landslide dam study cases have been reported (e.g., King et al 1989;Hermanns et al 2004;Dai et al 2005;Nash et al 2008;Duman 2009;Degraff et al 2010;Evans 2015, 2017;Emmer and Kalvoda 2017). Several landslide dam inventories have been collected in different parts of the world, such as in North America (O'Connor and Costa 1993), South America (Hermanns et al 2011), Europe (Casagli and Ermini 1999;Bonnard 2011;Tacconi Stefanelli et al 2015), Central Asia (Popov 1990;Hewitt 1998;Strom 2010;Korup et al 2010;Schneider et al 2013), China (Dong et al 2009;Fan et al 2012;Peng and Zhang 2012), and New Zealand (Korup 2004).…”

Formation, failure, and consequences of the Xiaolin landslide dam, triggered by extreme rainfall from Typhoon Morakot, Taiwan

“…Most landslide dam disasters due to excessively rainfall or earthquake events (Schuster 1993) occur in landslideprone countries, including New Zealand (Korup 2004, Korup 2005Korup and Tweed 2007), Japan (Tabata et al 2002), China (Chen et al 1992;Dai et al 2005;Liu et al 2010), and especially Taiwan with its frequent torrential rainfall and earthquake events (Chen 1999;Shou and Wang 2003;Hsu and Hsu 2009). The floods resulting from the bursting of a landslide dam can result in serious bank erosion and inundation of populated areas and farmland near the river.…”

“…The existence time of a landslide dam directly determines the seriousness of the subsequent flooding. Due to the seriousness of the event and insufficient reaction time, the failure of a landslide dam and the subsequent flooding have often resulted in numerous deaths (Costa and Schuster 1988;Shroder 1998;Chen et al 1992;Dai et al 2005;Duman 2009). …”

“…There have been many huge landslide dam failure events worldwide, including the failure of landslide dams in Southwestern China in 1786 (Chanson 2005;Dai et al 2005;Liu et al 2010;Xu et al 2009). It has been claimed that at least 5,500 deaths have occurred due to landslide dam failure events in China since 1900.…”

The Maoxian landslide as seen from space: detecting precursors of failure with Sentinel-1 data

“…For example, the 1933 Diexi earthquake (whose epicentre was located less than 10 km far from Xinmo) has caused about 6800 fatalities directly from the earthquake-triggered landslides and 8000 fatalities from the associated formation of 12 landslide dams (Chang 1934;Dai et al 2005;Huang 2009). Eight landslide dams remain today and analyses on the preserved soft-sediment deformation structures reveal that their potential causes are earthquakes and the derived landslides (Wang et al 2011).…”