DISTRIBUTION CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AD 1556 HUAXIAN EARTHQUAKE TRIGGERED DISASTERS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

A complete understanding to the disasters triggered by giant earthquakes is not only crucial to effectively evaluating the reliability of existing earthquake magnitude, but also supporting the seismic hazard assessment. The great historical earthquake with estimated magnitude of M8.5 in Huaxian County on the 23^rd January 1556, which caused a death toll of more than 830 000, is the most serious earthquake on the global record. But for a long time, the knowledge about the hazards of this earthquake has been limited to areas along the causative Huashan piedmont fault(HSPF) and within the Weihe Basin. In this paper, we made a study on earthquake triggered landslides of the 1556 event along but not limited to the HSPF. Using the high-resolution satellite imagery of Google Earth for earthquake-triggered landslide interpretation, we obtained two dense loess landslides areas generated by the 1556 earthquake, which are located at the east end and west end of the HSPF. The number of the interpreted landslides is 1 515 in the west area(WA), which is near to the macro-epicentre, and 2 049 in the east area(EA), respectively. Based on the empirical relationship between the landslide volume and area, we get the estimated landslide volume of 2.85~6.40km³ of WA and EA, which is equivalent or bigger than the value of ~2.8km³ caused by Wenchuan earthquake of M_W7.9 on 12^th May 2008. These earthquake triggered landslides are the main cause for the death of inhabitants living in houses or loess house caves located outside of the basin, such as Weinan, Lintong, Lantian(affected by WA) and Lingbao(affected by EA). Our results can help deeply understand the distribution characteristics of coseismic disaster of the 1556 Huaxian earthquake to the south of Weihe Basin, and also provide important reference for the modification of the isoseismals.