Publications

The idea for Landslides and Engineering Geology of the Seattle, Washington, Areagrew out of a major landslide disaster that occurred in the Puget Sound region at the beginning of 1997. Unusually heavy snowfall in late December 1996 followed by warm, intense rainfall on 31 December through 2 January 1997 produced hundreds of damaging landslides in communities surrounding Puget Sound. This...

Dynamic stresses generated by earthquakes can trigger landslides. Current methods of landslide analysis such as pseudo-static analysis and Newmark's method focus on the effects of earthquake accelerations on the landslide mass to characterize dynamic landslide behaviour. One limitation of these methods is their use Mohr-Coulomb failure criteria, which only accounts for shear failure, but...

In 1969, Nelson County, Virginia received up to 71 cm of rain within 12 h starting at 7 p.m. on August 19. The total rainfall from the storm exceeded the 1000-year return period in the region. Several thousands of landslides were induced by rainfall associated with Hurricane Camille causing fatalities and destroying infrastructure. We apply a distributed transient response model for...

As part of a collaborative campaign to investigate Transient Lummous Events (TLEs) over South America, coordinated optical, ELF/VLF, and lightning measurements were made of a mesoscale thunderstorm observed on February 22-23, 2006 over northern Argentina that produced 445 TLEs within a ???6 hour period. Here, we report comprehensive measurements of one of these events, a sprite with halo...

Application of transient deterministic shallow landslide models over broad regions for hazard and susceptibility assessments requires information on rainfall, topography and the distribution and properties of hillside materials. We survey techniques for generating the spatial and temporal input data for such models and present an example using a transient deterministic model that...

The 2008 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Seismic Hazard Maps display earthquake ground motions for various probability levels across the United States and are applied in seismic provisions of building codes, insurance rate structures, risk assessments, and other public policy. This update of the maps incorporates new findings on earthquake ground shaking, faults, seismicity, and...

This volume brings together case studies and summary papers describing the application of state-of-the-art engineering geologic methods to landslide hazard analysis for the Seattle, Washington, area. An introductory chapter provides a thorough description of the Quaternary and bedrock geology of Seattle. Nine additional chapters review the history of landslide mapping in Seattle, present...

We have used historical records of damaging landslides triggered by rainstorms, and a newly developed Probabilistic Landslide Assessment Cost Estimation System (PLACES), to estimate the numbers and direct costs of future landslides in the San Francisco Bay region. The estimated annual cost of future landslides in the entire region is about US $15 million (year 2000 $). The estimated...

A methodology was recently proposed for the development of hazard-compatible building fragility models using parameters of capacity curves and damage state thresholds from HAZUS (Karaca and Luco, 2008). In the methodology, HAZUS curvilinear capacity curves were used to define nonlinear dynamic SDOF models that were subjected to the nonlinear time history analysis instead of the capacity...

To manage the hazard associated with shallow landslides, decision makers need an understanding of where and when landslides may occur. A variety of approaches have been used to estimate the hazard from shallow, rainfall-triggered landslides, such as empirical rainfall threshold methods or probabilistic methods based on historical records. The wide availability of Geographic Information...

Hydrothermal alteration at Mount Rainier waxed and waned over the 500,000-year episodic growth of the edifice. Hydrothermal minerals and their stable-isotope compositions in samples collected from outcrop and as clasts from Holocene debris-flow deposits identify three distinct hypogene argillic/advanced argillic hydrothermal environments: magmatic-hydrothermal, steam-heated, and magmatic...

Active landslides throughout the states and territories of the United States result in extensive property loss and 25-50 deaths per year. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has a long history of detailed examination of landslides since the work of Howe (1909) in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. In the last four decades, landslide inventory maps and landslide hazard maps have depicted...