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Comprehensive Global Database of Earthquake-Induced Landslide Events and Their Impacts

July 13, 2020

Currently, there are many datasets describing landslides caused by individual earthquakes, and global inventories of earthquake-induced landslides (EQIL). However, until recently, there were no datasets that provide a comprehensive description of the impacts of earthquake-induced landslide events. In this data release, we present an up-to-date, comprehensive global database containing all literature-documented earthquake-induced landslide events for the 244-year period from 1772 through May 2020.The database represents an update of the catalog developed by Nowicki Jessee et al. (2020), which summarized events through 2016. The revised catalog contains 264 historical earthquakes, 153 of which include documented landslide fatality counts. The database includes (where available) information on earthquake size (moment magnitude (Mw), surface-wave magnitude (Ms), and body-wave magnitude (mb)), depth, earthquake fault type, date and time, location, the availability of a ShakeMap, which estimates the spatial distribution of ground shaking from the USGS ShakeMap system (Worden and Wald, 2016), the availability of a geospatial landslide inventory, information about landslide occurrence (number of landslides, area or volume of landsliding, area affected by landsliding, landslide magnitude), earthquake/landslide impact (total fatalities, landslide fatalities, and number of injuries due to the effects of the earthquake), and USGS Ground Failure Tool estimates (estimated area and population exposed to landsliding). The full dataset of all known landslide-triggering events is provided as “EQIL Database 2020.csv,” including information on the data source(s) for each data component. A subset of the dataset, showing only those events for which landslide fatality counts are available, is provided as “EQIL Database LSFatality 2020.csv.”

Publication Year 2020
Title Comprehensive Global Database of Earthquake-Induced Landslide Events and Their Impacts
DOI 10.5066/P9NWIRZZ
Authors Dylan M. Seal, Anna Nowicki Jessee, Michael W. Hamburger
Product Type Data Release
Record Source USGS Digital Object Identifier Catalog
USGS Organization Earthquake Hazards Program