Drought, deluge turned stable landslide into disaster

[Jim__]

From phys.org:

"Stable landslide" sounds like a contradiction in terms, but there are indeed places on Earth where land has been creeping downhill slowly, stably and harmlessly for as long as a century. But stability doesn't necessarily last forever. For the first time, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and collaborating institutions have documented the transition of a stable, slow-moving landslide into catastrophic collapse, showing how drought and extreme rains likely destabilized the slide.

The Mud Creek landslide near Big Sur, California, dumped about 6 million cubic yards (5 million cubic meters) of rock and debris across California Highway 1 on May 20, 2017. The damage took more than a year and $54 million to repair. No long-term motion had been documented at Mud Creek before this event, but workers in the state's transportation department had noticed small mudslides in the weeks before the collapse and closed the highway as a precaution.

The JPL-led team identified Mud Creek as a stable landslide using an eight-year data set from an airborne JPL instrument called the Uninhabited Airborne Vehicle Synthetic Aperature Radar, processed with a technique called interferometric synthetic aperture radar processing (InSAR). They calculated that Mud Creek had been sliding at an average speed of about 7 inches (17 centimeters) per year since at least 2009. They used the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1A/B satellite data to document how the sliding area's behavior changed.

The airborne and satellite data measure changes only at the ground surface, however. "From that, we tried to infer what may have happened to the landslide's sliding surface, tens of meters underground, that allowed the Mud Creek slide to transition from stable to unstable," said the study's lead author, Alexander Handwerger, a NASA postdoctoral fellow doing research at JPL.

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