Eastern Alps Rockslides Triggered by Past Earthquakes miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Past earthquakes triggered large rockslides in the Eastern Alps
16.02.2021
Geologists from the University of Innsbruck shed new light on a long-lasting debate about the trigger mechanism of large rockslides. Lake mud in two Alpine lakes in Tyrol reveal that rare strong earthquakes are the final cause of multiple, prehistoric rockslides in the Eastern Alps. The study has now been published in the Journal Nature Communications.
Image: In the 8 m long sediment cores the geologists found different types of earthquake traces. The picture shows the Plansee in Reutte, Tyrol. (Credit: Jasper Moernaut)
Many steep valleys in the European Alps show the relicts of large rockslides, during which several hundreds of million cubic metres of rocks get instable, collapse and impact everything on their path. “For most of these, we still do not know how they are caused, because these rockslides occurred long before the start of written history in the region about 1000 years ago,” says
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Unique record: 220,000 years of earthquake history
A 457-metre long “data treasure” in the shape of a drilling core from the Dead Sea provides a unique insight into past earthquake history. These findings are essential for improving seismic hazard assessment. Yin Lu is an expert in the field of paleoseismology and has recently joined the Sedimentary Geology research group at the Department of Geology.
Earthquakes are among the most devastating natural disasters on our planet. Especially large earthquakes with a magnitude above 7 are very dangerous. In order to understand the dynamics behind earthquakes, a look into the past is essential. However, this look does not go very far, as reliable seismological recordings only reach back about 100 years, and historical data are not sufficient in this respect. Researchers therefore rely on drilling cores from sediment deposits from the deep sea or even lakes to obtain precise data from prehistoric times. “The different sedi