RAPID - Topographic Change and Cascading Hazards Following the Mw7.8 Kaikoura (New Zealand) Earthquake

Marin Clark, University of Michigan

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This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project will examine the effects of the November 13, 2016, series of earthquakes in the Kaikoura region of New Zealand on faulting and landslide processes. The focus of the effort will be to develop a digital elevation model and time series for this event and conduct field work to evaluate the remote sensing products. The work will complement other urgent response efforts underway in New Zealand following the earthquakes. It will enhance international collaboration among scientists in the United States and New Zealand and meaningfully involve students in the scientific research process.

The 4D evolution of topography is critical for understanding faulting and landslide processes. For major events that deform and erode landscapes, such as earthquakes, we lack data at an event scale for understanding such processes because of the prohibitive cost of repeat land and airborne surveys. Existing high-resolution topographic surveys tend to be small in geographic extent, and thus the chance of catching an area before an event is rare and usually limited in scope. However, recent advances in high performance computing coupled with stereo-satellite imagery collection create the opportunity to provide regional scale data that can be processed for high-resolution topography. Such surveys can potentially be repeated with modest resources such that a topographic time series data can be created quickly and relatively inexpensively. Per contracts with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and supercomputer centers, the PIs will gain access to the existing stereo imagery and super computer processing time needed to immediately develop and deliver a pre-event, high resolution digital elevation model to all researchers working on this event. This work will contribute to the understanding of landslide hazards after major earthquakes involving complex, multi-fault source mechanisms, and will be readily exportable to the scientific response of other earthquakes at other plate boundary settings.