Cascading dynamics recovers actual landslide scaling exponent

Abstract

Earlier models of landslide required distributed and continuous driving of constant magnitude to arrive at distributions similar to real data, i.e. tails fitting a power law of exponent -2.3. In this work, we show that transient, small and localized stress also recover the correct exponent along with similar temporal signatures of the system. The local region of constant perturbation is found to behave like the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld sandpile, and the rest of the pile is driven by the avalanches resulting from this region. The model is deemed to be more realistic, because in actual landslide events, the perturbations cannot be that large and widespread enough, but are in fact negligibly small and local.