Seismic detections of rock slope failures

Timeline

2026 - ongoing

Project description

With this project, we aim to develop and maintain a long-term and up-to-date catalog of large rock slope failures across the European Alps. The frequency of large failures in the Alps has been increasing, with the recent years experiencing multiple events with magnitudes in the order of a million cubic meters per year. Efforts to monitor rock slope failures are often done at a local to regional scale and the reports arrive with significant time lags.

The backbone of this project is to integrate an environmental seismology approach with the standard field observations of rock slope failures in order to establish a near real-time joint inventory. Seismic networks are able to provide continuous data streams, which can quantify events happening in remote locations in any weather conditions. For this, they complement well with the typical rock slope failure catalogs relying on observer networks and which are inherently biased. The Swiss Seismological Service (SED) were the first to show the potential of combining seismic detections with feedback from field observations to categorize non-earthquake events as various gravitational mountain hazards. This motivated us to explore the opportunities of leveraging the well established seismic infrastructure for the monitoring of rock slope failures beyond Switzerland.

This project is working with many partners around the Alps to compile as many as possible data sources to combine with the events detected by seismology. The resulting multi-method inventory will be analyzed to assess long term trends within the context of a changing climate. Initial results can be explored in the in-development interactive map OSCAR.

Project members

Giulio Saibene, Jan Beutel, Dominik Amschwand and external collaborators.

Related publications

Saibene, G., Amschwand, D., and Beutel, J. and the Rockfall Group Collaboration: Near Real-time Detection of Mass Movements at an Alpine Scale, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-19133, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-19133, 2026.