Seismogenic Landslides and other Mass Movements (ver. 4.0, October 2026)

This data release is a compilation of known landslides and other mass movements that generated seismic signals observable on existing seismic networks. The data release includes basic information about each event such as location, volume, area, and runout distances as well as information about seismic detections and the location of seismic data, photos, maps, geographic information system (GIS) files, and links to papers, websites, and media reports about the event. This data release represents an expansion to global events of a previous data release of North American events (Allstadt and others, 2017) available at https://doi.org/10.5066/F7251H3W and follows the same methods. This data release forms the basis of the Exotic Seismic Event Catalog (ESEC), an interactive data product hosted by the EarthScope (Bahavar and others, 2019), available at https://data.earthscope.org/app/products/portal/esec/. The ESEC also allows the addition of individual events by other contributors.

We compiled events for inclusion in the database through personal communication with scientists, particularly at local seismic networks and volcano observatories, as well as by searching the scientific literature and other sources such as blogs and media reports. We prioritized events for which independent (non-seismic) verification of event characteristics was available. The database of compiled events (lsseis.db) is provided in its native SQLite3 format and the structure of the database and its data dictionary are detailed in SQLdatabase_info.zip. For user convenience, we also include a comma-separated value (CSV) summary file of the events table (Events.csv). The GIS shapefiles.zip file contains a point shapefile of the event locations including most of the information from the events table and a polygon shapefile for events where runout and/or source areas could be delineated. The EventData.zip file contains a folder for each event that may contain figures, photos, maps, GIS shapefiles, and seismic data (if not already archived publicly) and individual CSV summary files containing information for that event extracted from the event database (lsseis.db) 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. Not all record types exist for each event, and the quality of the information varies from event to event. Published values for area and path measurements, volume, and mass were used and cited when available. If published values were not available, when possible, we made our own calculations using satellite imagery (for an example of this process, refer to Figure1_Eid161.png). We estimated volumes from source or deposit areas when no published values were available primarily by adapting the methods published by Larsen and others (2010) for estimating volume from landslide source area. The source of all physical measurements is described in notes in the information table of the lsseis.db file and the *_information.csv associated with each event. We manually examined available seismic data for each event in high frequency velocity waveforms (1-5 Hz) (for an example, refer to Figure2_Eid150.png), long period displacement waveforms (20-60 sec) (e.g. Figure2_Eid150.png), and filtered infrasound waveforms (0.5-2 Hz) (e.g. Figure3_Eid177.png). For more details on the methods for gathering and estimating the event information, area and path measurements, volume and mass estimation, and seismic and infrasonic data analysis see the detailed processing steps described in Seismogenic_Landslides_and_other_Mass_Movement_v4_FGDC.xml.

First posted: April 19, 2022 (available from author)
Revised: October 2026 (version 4.0, see Summary_of_Changes.txt for revision history)


References:
Allstadt, K.E., McVey, B.G., and Malone, S.D., 2017, Seismogenic landslides, debris flows, and outburst floods in the western United States and Canada from 1977 to 2017: U.S. Geological Survey data release, doi: 10.5066/F7251H3W.

Bahavar, M., Allstadt K.E., Van Fossen, M., Malone, S.D., and Trabant, C, 2019, Exotic Seismic Events Catalog (ESEC) Data Product: Seismological Research Letters, v.90 no.3, p. 1355-1363, doi: 10.1785/0220180402.

Larsen, I.J., Montgomery, D.R., and Korup, O., 2010, Landslide erosion controlled by hillslope material: Nature Geoscience, v.3, p. 247-251, doi: 10.1038/NGEO776