Structural and geologic controls on gigantic (>1 Gm³) landslides in carbonate sequences: case studies from the Zagros Mountains, Iran and Rocky Mountains, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two gigantic landslides in carbonate sequences were studied through a combination of remotely sensed datasets and detailed field investigation. Field investigations supplemented the remote analysis at both sites. The work presents the first detailed documentation of the Seymareh (Saidmarreh) landslide, Zagros Mountains, Iran, which is shown to be the largest known rock avalanche in the world and the largest known landslide of any type on the Earth’s land surface. Volume of the Seymareh rock avalanche (38 Gm³) was previously underestimated by nearly 50 percent. The failure mode was complex planar sliding involving fold-related bedding-parallel shears and local break-through of bedding. The overall dip of the sliding surface was 11°. Lateral release and toe release were provided by tectonically-weakened joints and by break-out likely assisted by fluvial undercutting, respectively. Broad scar morphology and outcrop-scale features indicate the presence of nine discrete sliding surfaces distributed through the failed sequence and define nine stacked plates involved in the detachment. The Valley of the Rocks rock avalanche (1.3 Gm³), Rocky Mountains, Canada is described in detail for the first time and shown to be the largest known rock avalanche in North America as well as the largest known landslide of any type in Canada. The failure mode was simple planar sliding along a bedding-parallel, slightly concave-up surface possibly coinciding with a thrust fault (average dip 25°). Lateral release and toe release were provided by bedding-normal joints and by glacial undercutting, respectively. There is a surprisingly high degree of similarity between the two rock avalanches, despite differences in tectonic and climatic setting.. Similarities and differences between the two gigantic landslides suggest several factors important in volume determination of gigantic landslides in carbonate sequences: 1) extensive contiguous source slope; 2) high degree of structural continuity, especially across slope parallel to strike; 3) a comparatively low failure surface dip; 4) discontinuity-parallel slopes, and subsequent toe undercutting; and 5) hard-over-soft geomechanical contrasts. Comparison with magnitude-mobility relationships for landslides over five orders of magnitude shows that the Seymareh rock avalanche suggests an upper limit for landslide mobility (fahrböschung = ~4°) on the Earth’s continental surface.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".