Environmental seismology: Listening to landslides whispering

The rapidly emerging field of Environmental Seismology (EnviroSeis) uses seismological techniques to monitor geomorphic processes at Earth’s surface, providing non-invasive, relatively inexpensive, continuous constraints on physical properties and dynamics of surface processes including landslides, debris flows, snow avalanches, river sediment transport, and variations in groundwater table. EnviroSeis has direct ties to real-time geohazards monitoring and provides timely warnings for the hazard mitigation and assessment. Nowadays, the places in world with real-time seismic networks are ready to implement EnviroSeis. The major topic focused on here is how to provide relevant information on the deep-seated landslides associated to the three-time stages:

• Pre-slide: (1) seismic precursor and (2) seismic velocity changes corresponding to basal sliding behavior.
• Sliding: A real-time landquake monitoring (RLMS; http://collab.cv.nctu.edu.tw/main.html)
• After-slide: (1) near-real-time monitoring of river sediment transport and (2) early warning of the landslide-generated tsunami.