Landslide and basin self-organized criticality in the Lushan Hot Spring area

Defining a basin under a critical state (or a self-organized criticality) that has the potential to initiate landslides, debris flows, and subsequent sediment disasters, is a key issue for disaster prevention. The Lushan Hot Spring area in Nantou County, Taiwan, suffered serious sediment disasters after typhoons Sinlaku and Jangmi in 2008, and following Typhoon Morakot in 2009. The basin’s internal slope instability after the typhoons brought rain was examined using the landslide frequency-area distribution. The critical state indices attributed to landslide frequency-area distribution are discussed and the marginally unstable characteristics of the study area indicated. The landslides were interpreted from Spot 5 images before and after disastrous events. The results of the analysis show that the power-law landslide frequency-area curves in the basin for different rainfall-induced events tend to coincide with a single line. The temporal trend of the rainfall-induced landslide frequency-area distribution shows 1/f noise and scale invariance. A trend exists for landslide frequency-area distribution in log-log space for larger landslides controlled by the historical maximum accumulated rainfall brought by typhoons. The unstable state of the basin, including landslides, breached dams, and debris flows, are parts of the basin’s self-organizing processes. The critical state of landslide frequency-area distribution could be estimated by a critical exponent of 1.0. The distribution could be used for future estimation of the potential landslide magnitude for disaster mitigation and to identify the current state of a basin for management.