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Map data of landslides triggered by the 25 April 2015 Mw 7.8 Gorkha, Nepal earthquake

Metadata Updated: July 6, 2024

The 25 April 2015 Mw 7.8 Gorkha earthquake and its aftershocks triggered about 25,000 landslides over an area of more than 30,000 km2 in the Greater and Lesser Himalaya of Nepal and China. In order to understand the relation among landslide ___location, earthquake shaking, topography, tectonic geologic and climatic setting, earthquake-triggered landslides were mapped using high-resolution (<1m pixel resolution) pre- and post-event satellite imagery. Source and runout areas were differentiated and mapped separately. The data accompany an interpretive paper published in the journal Geomorphology. The published products are separate ESRI ArcMap 10.2.2 shapefiles that comprise: (i) mapped landslide source areas, (ii) mapped landslide full areas (source, transport and deposit area combined), (iii) the extent of geographic areas in which mapping was completed, (iv) obscured areas in which the mapping is incomplete because of the lack of clear, undistorted satellite data from post-earthquake dates, and (v) image quality designation for mapped regions. 24,915 landslide areas were mapped in the full20170209.shp file (full areas) compared to 24,795 landslide areas in the source20170209.shp file (source areas). This small discrepancy in total number arises because of image distortion and partial cloud cover. One hundred forty two of the full areas lack an identifiable source area. Additionally, 10 full areas have 2 corresponding source areas because the full area could not be divided into 2 separate runout areas due to image distortion; 12 other source areas do not have corresponding full areas. This work was supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) RAPID award from the Geomorphology and Land Use Dynamics program to West (EAR-1546630) and Clark (EAR-1546631), partially supported by NSF Geomorphology and Land Use Dynamics program (EAR-1640894 to West and EAR-1640797 to Clark and Zekkos), University of Michigan internal award to Clark and Zekkos (MCubed 2.0 Project ID 917) and a Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Research Commission research grant (ETH-15 15-2) awarded to Gallen. We thank Paul Morin from the PGC (Polar Geospatial Center) for providing imagery access and support for acquiring satellite data through a NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) cooperative agreement with NSF. We also thank Kristen Cook, William Greenwood, Julie Bateman, Bibek Giri, Maarten Lupker and John Galetzka for their assistance during a 2015 field expedition to Nepal.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

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Dates

Metadata Created Date May 31, 2023
Metadata Updated Date July 6, 2024

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI EDI

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date May 31, 2023
Metadata Updated Date July 6, 2024
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
@Id http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/23418d5376a0afc648838590ea17824d
Identifier USGS:582c74fbe4b04d580bd377e8
Data Last Modified 20200821
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://datainventory.doi.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 28fd96b5-9521-4884-9ab5-4ee8237d8e4d
Harvest Source Id 52bfcc16-6e15-478f-809a-b1bc76f1aeda
Harvest Source Title DOI EDI
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial 84.093749556,27.11262257,86.932918253,28.726795093
Publisher Hierarchy White House > U.S. Department of the Interior > U.S. Geological Survey
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 26040831135cfef28ba90b634bf19eda626a375108b0be6be34078e0be6edb36
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": 84.093749556, 27.11262257, 84.093749556, 28.726795093, 86.932918253, 28.726795093, 86.932918253, 27.11262257, 84.093749556, 27.11262257}

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