{"id":28795,"date":"2018-10-02T07:04:35","date_gmt":"2018-10-02T07:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=28795"},"modified":"2018-10-02T07:05:24","modified_gmt":"2018-10-02T07:05:24","slug":"palu-sulawesi-earthquake-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2018\/10\/02\/palu-sulawesi-earthquake-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Giant landslides in Palu from the 2018 Sulawesi earthquake"},"content":{"rendered":"

Giant landslides in Palu from the 2018 Sulawesi earthquake<\/h4>\n

As decent satellite imagery starts to become available, the landslides in the vicinity of the city of Palu, triggered by the 2018 Sulawesi earthquake<\/a>, are becoming clear.\u00a0 The picture is fascinating and tragic, providing an explanation for some of the remarkable footage that we have seen.\u00a0 There is a key message here – although it is the tsunami that has attracted most of the attention, three very large landslides in Palu have caused very high levels of loss.\u00a0 These three landslides are remarkable.<\/p>\n

So, starting from the south, let’s take a look at these three slides.\u00a0 The first appears to be in the vicinity of an area called Tinggede, on the outskirts of Palu.\u00a0 This is the Planet Labs<\/a> image of the landslide:-<\/p>\n

\"Palu\"

The Tinggede landslide on the outskirts of Palu. Image via Planet Labs<\/a>, used with permission.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

This is the landslide that was caught on the video with the transmission tower<\/a>.\u00a0 This is a very large slide – I estimate that the headscarp is about 1 km across, and the slide is over 3 km in length.\u00a0 On the east side of the scarp is a canal, which has breached, but my reading of the situation is that the breach happened because of the slide, not vice-versa.\u00a0 This is a flow type slide (rather than a lateral spread), with many houses being involved.\u00a0 The level of destruction is almost complete, judging by the imagery.\u00a0 I find it hard to believe that there was not significant loss of life here.<\/p>\n

If that is bad, the second landslide in the area of Palu is worse:-<\/p>\n

\"Palu\"

The Palu airport landslide from the 2018 Sulawesi earthquake. Planet Labs image<\/a>, used with permission.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

This landslide is just to the south of the Palu airport runway.\u00a0 Again, it is very large.\u00a0 I estimate that the scarp width is about 1.5 km, and the length is over 2.5 km.\u00a0 There are two main components, and the image needs careful inspection.\u00a0 What captures the eye initially is the area of bare soil in the landslide source.\u00a0 But look to the west of this – you will see a lobe structure extending almost to the edge of the image, which is the landslide deposit.\u00a0 This consists of soil and debris from the landslide, but also huge numbers of buildings, compressed together and wrecked.\u00a0 There is a second lobe, albeit smaller, to the south.\u00a0 The level of destruction to vast number of properties is vast.\u00a0 Again, it is hard to believe that there is not very significant loss of life here.<\/p>\n

The third landslide is smaller, but far from trivial.\u00a0 This landslide is close to the city centre, with movement from the west towards the east:-<\/p>\n

\"Palu\"

The landslide close to the centre of Palu, triggered by the 2018 Sulawesi earthquake. Planet Labs image<\/a>, used with permission.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

This landslide in Palu is about 500 m wide and about 1km long.\u00a0 Again, the bare soil of the source draws attention, but the vast number of houses compressed into a debris zone to the east is also evident, extending to the edge of the image. The level of destruction is very high.<\/p>\n

All three of these landslides in Palu appear to be shallow slides on comparatively low angle slopes.\u00a0 All are close to the fault trace.\u00a0 In this area there are few other large landslides (there may be many other ones that cannot be resolved on this imagery).<\/p>\n

Further to the south there are huge numbers of smaller landslides.\u00a0 These will feature in a future post.<\/p>\n

Reference<\/h4>\n

Planet Team (2018). Planet Application Program Interface: In Space for Life on Earth. San Francisco, CA. https:\/\/api.planet.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The city of Palu appears to have suffered from three very large (over 1 km) landslides in the 2018 Sulawesi earthquake, all causing huge amounts of damage <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[537],"tags":[16802,23,469,141,314,17657],"class_list":["post-28795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-earthquake-induced-landslide","tag-coseismic-landslide","tag-earthquake","tag-featured","tag-indonesia","tag-se-asia","tag-sulawesi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28795","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=28795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}