13 February 2014

Xinjiang: Landslides from the M=6.9 earthquake in NW China yesterday

Posted by Dave Petley

The Xinjiang earthquake

The Chinese province of Xinjiang was hit by a shallow, Mw=6.9 earthquake at 9:20 UTC yesterday.  The USGS data suggests that this occurred on a strike-slip fault in a remote and reasonably mountainous area:

14_02 Xinjiang 1

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Landslides from the Xinjiang earthquake

The more observant of you will have noticed I have changed the images.  It turns out that the earlier ones weren’t from this earthquake!

A shallow (10 km deep) earthquake of this magnitude certainly has the potential to generate significant numbers of landslides (and of course damage), but of course the human impacts are fortunately limited because of the low population density in this area.  Indeed Xinhua is reporting no casualties and about 7,000 people affected.

However, this event could be interesting from a landslide perspective.  Xinhua has a set of images of the area affected by the earthquake.  One of them shows a landslide-affected road:

Xinjiang

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/photo/2014-02/13/c_133113060_14.htm

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Whilst others suggest that the impact of landslides might have been quite light (but note the apparently fresh slumps in the foreground):

Xinjiang

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/photo/2014-02/13/c_133113060_14.htm

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Hopefully further images will appear in the coming days.