Seismogenic Landslides and other Mass Movements (ver. 2.0, December 2023)

This data release is a compilation of known mass movements that generated seismic signals recorded by seismic networks. It represents a major update of a previous data release (Allstadt and others, 2017) available at https://doi.org/10.5066/F7251H3W. This update includes all events published in the previous data release along with more instances of landslides, debris flows, snow avalanches, outburst floods, and lahars as well as new event types like mine collapses, a submarine landslide, and a volcanic flank collapse. The previous data release included only mass movements in the western United States and Canada. The current data release adds new events in North America, and it also expands the coverage to include events in the European Alps and Pacific Islands (see interactive map at right for event locations). The new catalog increases the total number of events from 114 to 245 spanning from 1977 to 2021. In addition to information about event times, seismic detections, and the location of seismic data, basic event information (e.g., event type, location, volume, area, and runout distances) is associated with each event. We also include photos, maps, geographic information system (GIS) files, and links to papers, websites, and media reports when available. Infrasound detections for events are also noted in this update. Not all record or data types exist for each event, and the quality of the information and data varies from event to event.

This data release, and the previous data release, form the primary basis of the Exotic Seismic Event Catalog (ESEC), an interactive data product hosted by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) (Bahavar and others, 2019) available at https://ds.iris.edu/ds/products/esec/. The ESEC also allows the addition of individual events by other contributors. Several were added to the ESEC between 2017 and the present, and we have incorporated those into this data release as well. A few of these contributed events, as well as those from the Allstadt and others (2017) data release, have been updated with new information and references in cases where new literature was available since the events were originally added (see SummaryofChanges_v1.txt for details).

The events database (lsseis.db) is provided in its native SQLite3 format, which preserves relational structure (see lsseis_DataDictionary.csv and lsseis_ERD.png for details). We also include a UTF-8 encoded summary comma-separated value (CSV) file of the events table (Events.csv) for user convenience and a point shapefile of the event locations that also contains most of the information from the events table (event_points.shp). The EventData.zip file contains a folder for each event, which in turn contains figures, photos, maps, and seismic data (if not already archived publicly) that are linked to the relational database and the CSV files. For events for which we created GIS shapefiles of outlines (runout and source areas) and centerlines (see Methods for details), those files are stored by event in these folders as well. Not all file types exist for all events. For users who do not want to use the relational database, we have also extracted the individual summary files for each event with any notes (*_information.csv), references used (*_references.csv), a list of seismic and infrasound detections (*_seismic_detections.csv), a list of photos and figures (*photos_figures.csv), and a list of maps and GIS files (*_maps_gis.csv), where the * indicates the unique event id (Eid), name, and date and these files are also located in the folders for each event.