{"id":19315,"date":"2016-07-27T07:34:31","date_gmt":"2016-07-27T07:34:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=19315"},"modified":"2016-07-27T13:17:05","modified_gmt":"2016-07-27T13:17:05","slug":"atacama-desert-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2016\/07\/27\/atacama-desert-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Landslides from the M=6.1 earthquake in the Atacama Desert on 25th July"},"content":{"rendered":"
Landslides from the M=6.1 earthquake in the Atacama Desert on 25th July<\/h5>\n

On Monday a M=6.1 earthquake occurred in the Atacama Desert<\/a>, 53 km to the north of the town of Diego de Almagro in Chile.\u00a0 This was not a very large earthquake, and it occurred at 71.5 km depth according to the USGS, meaning that the impact was low.\u00a0 It is likely to have generated comparatively low intensity shaking<\/a> over a large area.<\/p>\n

On Twitter, a series of images were posted of the impact of the earthquake in El Salvador<\/a>, a mining town located in the Atacama desert about 100 km from the epicentre of the earthquake.\u00a0 These show large plumes of dust being generated in the mountains around the town:<\/p>\n

\"Atacama

Dust clouds being generated in the hills in the Atacama Desert after the M=6.1 earthquake in Chile on Monday, via Twitter<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

\"Atacama

Dust clouds being generated in the hills in the Atacama Desert after the M=6.1 earthquake in Chile on Monday, via Twitter<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

\"Atacama

Dust clouds being generated by landslides in the hills of the Atacama Desert after the M=6.1 earthquake in Chile on Monday, via Twitter<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

Clearly there was significant landslide activity in this earthquake, although it is likely that the slides will mostly have been small and localised.\u00a0 We know little about landslide activity during earthquakes in very arid conditions, so this is a technically interesting event.\u00a0 The images suggest that the effects might have been similar to those from the 2010 Sierra Cucapah earthquake in Baja California, Mexico, which was captured on a youtube video that I posted at the time<\/a>.\u00a0 Working with colleagues at Durham, most notably John Barlow (who is now at the University of Sussex), we used satellite imagery to investigate at these landslides.\u00a0 This work was published about 18 months ago (Barlow et al.<\/em> 2014), and I posted a commentary about the paper at the time<\/a>.\u00a0 In that case we found that large numbers of comparatively small landslides were able to generate a large amount of dust.<\/p>\n

Reference<\/h5>\n

Barlow, J., Barisin, I., Rosser, N., Petley, D.,\u00a0 Densmore, A. and Wright, T. 2014. Seismically-induced mass movements and volumetric fluxes resulting from the 2010 Mw\u00a0=\u00a07.2 earthquake in the Sierra Cucapah, Mexico, Geomorphology<\/em>, 230<\/strong>, 138-145, http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1016\/j.geomorph.2014.11.012<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On 25th July 2016 a M=6.1 earthquake in the Atacama Desert appears to have triggered large numbers of landslides in the hills near the town of El Salvador, 100 km from the epicentre<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":19322,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1046,1034,1153,23,983,1149],"class_list":["post-19315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-chile","tag-desert","tag-dust","tag-earthquake","tag-landslide-images","tag-south-ameriica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}