After I saw one of the charts on this page I realized I should try to share this with you regarding potential landslides and likely mudslides too. The increasing amount of moisture that the air can hold at higher temperatures along with the increasing temperatures of the ocean will tend to cause more and more mudslides and erosion over the years. I'm not sure what all this is leading to other than people not being able to buy flood and earthquake and fire insurance on their homes at any price.U.S. Landslide Inventory and Susceptibility Map
Landslides are a damaging, disruptive, and potentially deadly geologic hazard. While landslides occur in every U.S. State, their impacts are often a localized and episodic phenomenon, plus landslide types and triggering mechanisms vary widely across the country. Looking at past incidents help us to understand and prepare for landslides, but information about historic landslide events varies in quality, availability, and extent. This makes it hard to get a clear picture of landslide risks across the entire country.
To improve this, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) studies landslide activity, compiles information about past landslides, and develops tools to predict where landslides might happen in the future. In particular, the two products described and linked here in our interactive online map are the national landslide inventory compilation (Mirus et al., 2020) and the national landslide susceptibility map (refer to Mirus et al., 2024).
Landslide inventories are collections of data about where landslides have occurred and may include other important details. This information on where they occur is essential for scientific research on landslides, as well as risk reduction efforts. Different agencies and groups keep their own landslide records, often in various formats and within specific regions, making it hard to get a complete picture. To address this, the USGS has created a nationwide landslide inventory and made it available online through an interactive map. This map includes digital data from both USGS and other sources, all formatted in a consistent way.
Given the wide range of landslide information sources, we provide an attribute to assess the relative confidence in the characterization of the location and extent of each landslide, which are shown in grayscale on the interactive map. Further details about each landslide and more recent information (when it exists) can be accessed by clicking the “more information” attribute, which also links users to the original source of the landslide information (whenever available). The database was first created in 2019 and updated in 2022, and it will continue to be updated as new landslide data becomes available. If you have landslide information to contribute, you can contact gs-haz_landslides_inventory@usgs.gov.
Landslide susceptibility models analyze different terrain features to show where landslides are more or less likely to occur. These maps are useful for land-use planning and reducing risks, and some have been created for areas in the U.S. where landslides are a major concern. However, many other areas lack detailed information about landslide risks and need better tools to assess these hazards.
Previous attempts to map landslide susceptibility across the U.S. and globally lack detail and tend to underestimate hazards in moderately sloping terrain, where most development and infrastructure are located. Using high-resolution USGS elevation data (3DEP) and locations of hundreds of thousands of landslides we test different modeling methods. Ultimately, we developed a more detailed and improved map of landslide susceptibility for the entire U.S. and Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, other U.S. territories did not have the appropriate combination of high-resolution digital elevation data and landslide positional data to be included in our efforts at the time of our analysis. The resolution of the new map (90 m) is less than previous products (1 km).
The interactive map shows landslide susceptibility with colors ranging from yellow (lower) to red (higher), while areas with no color have negligible risk. Please note, the model does not explicitly account for long-runout and does miss a handful of landslides (<1%) so some caution should be exercised in areas downslope of highly susceptible terrain.
For more details, you can read the journal article (Mirus et al., 2024) and download the GIS database from the USGS ScienceBase repository (Belair et al., 2024).
View the presentation below to learn about the research behind the new landslide susceptibility map.
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