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Increased landslide activity on forested hillslopes following two recent volcanic eruptions in Chile

Nature Geoscience volume 12, pages 284–289 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

Large explosive eruptions can bury landscapes beneath thick layers of tephra. Rivers subsequently overloaded with excess pyroclastic sediments have some of the highest reported specific sediment yields. Much less is known about how hillslopes respond to tephra loads. Here, we report a pulsed and distinctly delayed increase in landslide activity following the eruptions of the Chaitén (2008) and Puyehue–Cordón Caulle (2011) volcanoes in southern Chile. Remote-sensing data reveal that landslides clustered in densely forested hillslopes mostly two to six years after being covered by tephra. This lagged instability is consistent with a gradual loss of shear strength of decaying tree roots in areas of high tephra loads. Surrounding areas with comparable topography, forest cover, rainfall and lithology maintained landslide rates roughly ten times lower. The landslides eroded the landscape by up to 4.8 mm on average within 30 km of both volcanoes, mobilizing up to 1.6 MtC at rates of about 265 tC km–2 yr–1. We suggest that these yields may reinforce the elevated river loads of sediment and organic carbon in the decade after the eruptions. We recommend that studies of post-eruptive mass fluxes and hazards include lagged landslide responses of tephra-covered forested hillslopes, to avoid substantial underestimates.

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Fig. 1: Satellite images of the Chaitén and Puyehue volcanoes, along with post-eruptive forest losses.
Fig. 2: Time series of forest loss and landslide disturbance following the recent eruptions of the Chaitén and Puyehue volcanoes.
Fig. 3: Histograms of absolute and relative areas of post-eruptive forest losses and landslide disturbance with increasing distance from the craters of the Chaitén and Puyehue volcanoes.
Fig. 4: Cumulative distributions of estimated time lags between landslide occurrence and forest loss following the eruptions of the Chaitén and Puyehue volcanoes.
Fig. 5: Post-eruptive landslides in disturbed temperate rainforests around Chaitén Volcano.
Fig. 6: Prediction of landslide volume from footprint area.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request. We used the publicly available Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery (https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/ and https://sentinel.esa.int/) and Space Shuttle Radar Topgraphy Mission (https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/) data to map the landslides. Our rainfall analysis draws on Chilean station data (http://www.cr2.cl/datos-de-precipitacion/). The Global Forest Inventory is available at http://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest/download_v1.5.html.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partly funded by the projects CONICYT-BMBF PCCI20130045 and BMBF 01DN13060, courtesy of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. We thank A. Iroumé and E. Parra for help with logistics, and appreciate the support of E. Gonzalez and the rangers at Pumalín National Park, as well as the Dirección General Aeronautica Civil for permitting UAV flights. We thank J. J. Major for comments on the manuscript. We ran all computations using the statistical environment R (www.r-project.org).

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  1. Institute of Environmental Science and Geography, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Oliver Korup, Jan Seidemann & Christian H. Mohr

  2. Institute of Geosciences, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Oliver Korup

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O.K. and C.H.M. collected the field data. O.K. and J.S. analysed the data. O.K. designed the study and wrote the manuscript, with input from J.S. and C.H.M.

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Correspondence to Oliver Korup.

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Korup, O., Seidemann, J. & Mohr, C.H. Increased landslide activity on forested hillslopes following two recent volcanic eruptions in Chile. Nat. Geosci. 12, 284–289 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0315-9

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