Abstract
The Crimean Mountains in Ukraine constitute a seismically active region that is abundant in various types of mass movement. The limestone escarpments that rise above the Black Sea coast in the vicinity of the town of Yalta are particularly subject to considerable rockfall, landslide and debris flow processes that often endanger infrastructure and human life. The aims of this study were (i) to employ tree-ring analysis to reconstruct a record of slope instabilities (mainly block-type movement, rockfall, landslide and debris flows) within the Taraktash slope deformation over a period of more than two centuries and (ii) to establish the degree of correlation between periods of enhanced slope activity and both historical earthquakes. The temporal frequency of significant slope processes was addressed through a tree-ring analysis that took 738 increment cores from 255 Crimean pine trees (Pinus nigra ssp. pallasiana). The tree-ring record reveals periods of increased activity of block-type movements, rockfall and sliding during major earthquakes in 1790, 1875, 1927 and 1986.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the project of the Czech Science Foundation no. P209/12/0317: “Late Quaternary evolution of the complex gravitational slope deformations on the southern slopes of the Crimean Mountains (Ukraine)“. Thanks are also extended to Monika Hradecká for her review of the translation, and Veronika Komárková, Václav Stacke and Marek Václavek for their assistance in field work.
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Šilhán, K., Pánek, T., Hradecký, J. (2013). The Tree-Ring Reconstruction of Slope Instabilities Associated with Earthquakes (The Crimean Mts., Ukraine). In: Ugai, K., Yagi, H., Wakai, A. (eds) Earthquake-Induced Landslides. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32238-9_75
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32238-9_75
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