Assessing the rate of seismogravitational denudation of the relief of southeastern Altai: The Chagan-Uzun R. Basin

This paper considers the influence of earthquake-induced slope processes on relief changes. We used the parameters of Holocene maximum earthquake-induced landslides resulting from past great earthquakes in order to use these data for the Chagan-Uzun R. basin for deriving the rate of Holocene seismogravitational denudation for the highest southeastern part of the Russian Altai, which shows the highest seismic activity. It is shown that the influence of moderate earthquakes on this relief is negligibly small compared with that of larger earthquakes, while the landslides due to aftershocks provide a significant contribution in seismic regions where the aftershock process does not obey the Bath-Omori laws. Our numerical estimate for the rate of seismogravitational denudation obtained by statistical methods was corroborated by measuring the volumes of Holocene seismogravitational movements using the method of detailed profiling. It is shown that the volume of an earthquake-induced landslide is largely controlled by the size of the associated earthquake and by climate.