Landslides and earthquakes to be correlated, according to recent study

A recently published study demonstrates that earthquakes instead of climate change as previously thought, have an effect on the rate of landslides in Peru. The particular findings were published in Nature Geoscience (Nature Publishing Group, 2014) by Devin McPhillips, a research associate in the Department of Earth Sciences of Syracuse University.

Devin McPhillips and the co-authors of the paper, Paul Bierman, professor of geology at the University of Vermont; and Dylan Rood, a lecturer at Imperial College London (U.K.) spent the past several years in the Western Andes Mountains, studying cobbles in the Quebrada Veladera river channel and in an adjacent fill terrace. The research team measured the amount of Beryllium-10 (Be-10), a nuclide in the cobbles and managed to calculate erosion rates over tens of thousands of years. It was found that the range of Be concentrations in the cobbles from a relatively wet period, more than 16,000 years ago, did not differ much from the cobbles found in river channel cobles from more recent arid periods. According to McPhillips, "this suggests that the amount of erosion from landslides has not changed in response to climatic changes".