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GEOMORPHOLOGY

Stressed rocks cause big landslides

Nature Geoscience volume 14, pages 261–262 (2021)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 17 May 2021

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Near-surface stress patterns, influenced by topography, control the size and location of the largest landslides — but not necessarily smaller ones — according to a study of mountains at the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

Landslides constitute a major natural hazard, causing thousands of casualties and billions of dollars in damages every year1. Landslides commonly occur in hazard cascades; they can be triggered in abundance by severe storms or earthquakes, such as in Nepal in 20152, and can themselves cause flooding and debris flows down-valley, as exemplified by the recent Chamoli (Uttarakhand, India) disaster. On longer timescales, landslides are the main process transporting material from hillslopes to rivers in tectonically active landscapes3 and they place limits on the relief that mountain belts can attain4. By making fresh rock available for weathering5 and stripping hillslopes of vegetation6, landslides also play a key role in modulating Earth’s long-term carbon cycle. Despite the importance of landslides in landscape evolution and as natural hazards, what determines their size and occurrence is not well understood. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Li and Moon7 report a correlation between near-surface stress-field metrics and maximum landslide size, and propose a causal link.

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Fig. 1: A large landslide in the Longmen Shan.

Anne-Sophie Mreyen / Imaggeo.

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  1. Institut für Geowissenschaften, Universität Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Peter van der Beek

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  1. Peter van der Beek
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Correspondence to Peter van der Beek.

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van der Beek, P. Stressed rocks cause big landslides. Nat. Geosci. 14, 261–262 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00748-7

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