Southwest China is located in the southeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau and it is a region of high seismic activity. Historically, strong earthquakes that occurred here usually generated lots of landslides and brought destructive damages. This paper introduces several earthquake-triggered landslide events in this region and describes their characteristics. Also, the historical data of earthquakes with a magnitude of 7.0 or greater, having occurred in this region, is collected and the relationship between the affected area of landslides and earthquake magnitude is analysed. Based on the study, it can be concluded that strong earthquakes, steep topography as well as fragile geological environment, are the main reasons responsible for serious landslides in southwest China. At the same time, it is found that the relationship between the area affected by landslides and the earthquake magnitude in this region are consistent with what has been obtained worldwide. Moreover, in this paper, it is seen that the size of the areas affected by landslides change enormously even under the same earthquake magnitude in the study region. While at the same tectonic place or fault belt, areas affected by landslides presented similar outline and size. This means that local geological conditions and historical earthquake background have an important influence on landslides distribution, and they should be considered when assessing earthquake-triggered landslide hazards at Grade 1 according to ISSMGE.

During the 12 May 2008, Wenchuan earthquake in China, more than 15 000 landslides were triggered by the earthquake. Among these landslides, there were 112 large landslides generated with a plane area greater than 50 000 m². These large landslides were markedly distributed closely along the surface rupture zone in a narrow belt and were mainly located on the hanging wall side. More than 85% of the large landslides are presented within the range of 10 km from the rupture. Statistical analysis shows that more than 50% of large landslides occurred in the hard rock and second-hard rock, like migmatized metamorphic rock and carbonate rock, which crop out in the south part of the damaged area with higher elevation and steeper landform in comparison with the northeast part of the damaged area. All large landslides occurred in the region with seismic intensity ≥ X except a few of landslides in the Qingchuan region with seismic intensity IX. Spatially, the large landslides can be centred into four segments, namely the Yingxiu, the Gaochuan, the Beichuan and the Qingchuan segments, from southwest to northeast along the surface rupture. This is in good accordance with coseismic displacements. With the change of fault type from reverse-dominated slip to dextral slip from southwest to northeast, the largest distance between the triggered large landslides and the rupture decreases from 15 km to 5 km. The critical acceleration a_c for four typical large landslides in these four different segments were estimated by the Newmark model in this paper. Our results demonstrate that, given the same strength values and slope angles, the characteristics of slope mass are important for slope stability and deeper landslides are less stable than shallower landslides. Comprehensive analysis reveals that the large catastrophic landslides could be specifically tied to a particular geological setting where fault type and geometry change abruptly. This feature may dominate the occurrence of large landslides. The results will be useful for improving reliable assessments of earthquake-induced landslide susceptibility, especially for large landslides which may result in serious damages.

On 8 August 2017 an earthquake (M_S7.0) occurred within Jiuzhaigou County, Northern Aba Prefecture, Sichuan Province, China, triggering 4834 landslides with an individual area greater than 7.8 m² over a more than 400 km² region. Instead of correlating geological and topographic factors with the coseismic landslide distribution pattern, this study has attempted to reveal the control from seismic landslide susceptibility mapping, which relies on the calculation of critical acceleration values using a simplified Newmark block model. We calculated the average critical acceleration for each cell of the gridded study area (1 km×1 km), which represented the seismic landslide susceptibility of the cell. An index of the potential landslide area generation rate was defined, i.e., the possible landsliding area in each grid cell. In combination with PGA (peak ground acceleration) distribution, we calculated such indexes for each cell to predict the possible landslide hazard under seismic ground shaking. Results show that seismic landslide susceptibility plays an important role in determining the coseismic landslide pattern. The places with high seismic landslide susceptibility tends to host many landslides. Additionally, the areas with high potential landslide area generation rates have high real landslide occurrence rates, consistent with dominant small-medium scale landslides by this earthquake. This approach can aid assessment of seismic landslide hazards at a preliminary stage. Additionally, it forms a foundation for further research, such as the rapid evaluation of post-earthquake landslides and identifying highly impacted areas to help decision makers prioritize disaster relief efforts.

Earthquake-triggered landslides have drawn much attention around the world because of the severe hazards they pose. The 20 April 2013 M_s = 7.0 Lushan Earthquake, which occurred in the Longmen Shan region in Sichuan province, China, triggered more than 1000 landslides throughout an area of about 2200 km², and completely blocked many roads and exacerbated overall transportation problems in the mountainous terrain. Preliminary landslide inventory is complied immediately following the earthquake, mainly based on the high-resolution remote sensing images. At the same time, the distribution of these landslides is statistically investigated to determine how the occurrence of landslides correlates with distance from the earthquake epicenter, slope steepness, seismic intensity and rock type. Statistic analysis is conducted using landslide point density (LPD), which is defined as the number of landslides per square kilometer. It is found that LPD has a strong positive correlation with slope gradients and a negative-exponential decline with the distance from the epicenter. The higher LPD values occur in younger strata systems like Quaternary and Tertiary sediments in the study area. Spatially, the triggered landslides are controlled by the causative faults and mainly concentrated around the epicenter. All the landslides are located within the area with seismic intensity ≥ VII and in line with seismic intensity. Generally, LPD value decreases with increasing distance from the epicenter, and sometimes landslides are densely distributed along the roads in the mountainous region. Also, this study reveals that the empirical relationship between distance and seismic magnitude is more suitable for estimating the landslide concentration area during the Lushan earthquake compared to other methods.