Scenario of a 7 mw magnitude earthquake in Seattle shows a possible 30.000 landslides are possible.

[link to blogs.agu.org]


The researchers ran two different scenarios for the landslides associated with a Seattle earthquake. In the first they assumed that the earthquake occurred when conditions were dry. In this case the earthquake generated just 4,977 landslides covering a source area of about 0.2 square kilometres. On the other hand, when the scenario was run for saturated conditions – in this case they generated 30,000 landslides covering 1.9 square kilometres in the city. It has long been hypothesised that antecedent weather conditions play a strong role in determining coseismic landslide distributions – this study supports that view. Fortunately, the extreme ends of the spectrum represented by these scenarios are unlikely – the probability is that the earthquake would occur when groundwater levels are somewhere between the two.