From Taiwan to Tibet: Expanding the Real-time Landquake Monitoring System (RLAMS) for Glacier Collapse Events
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.64862/Keywords:
RLAMS, Landquakes, Seismic waveform inversion, Glacier collapseAbstract
The Real-time Landquake Monitoring System (RLAMS) has been operated in Taiwan since 2015, was developed to automatically detect, locate, and characterize large-scale (volume exceeding 106 m3) landquakes (landslide, rock avalanche, glacier collapse) using real-time seismic signals. Integrating full seismic waveform inversion and location approach, RLAMS provides near-real-time estimation of source location, magnitude, and sliding force dynamics. This system has been successfully implemented for monitoring recent landquake events in Taiwan, where intense rainfall and seismic activity frequently trigger catastrophic slope failures. In particular, RLAMS was directly applied to the 2025 Matai’an landslide in eastern Taiwan, which formed a large landslide dam. The subsequent dam-break flood caused severe downstream devastation, resulting in 19 fatalities, 5 missing people, and 157 injuries. The seismic inversion approach adopted in RLAMS has also been applied to analyze the 2016 twin Aru Glacier collapses on the Tibetan Plateau and the 2022 Bukadaban East Glacier collapse (Xinqingfeng Ice Cap), unraveling source failure mechanisms for these catastrophic ice–mass movements. Based on above applications, this study proposes the new development of an RLAMS network in the Tibet region (Tibet-RLAMS), which will enable real-time detection and monitoring of future glacier collapses and other large gravitational mass-wasting processes across the plateau utilizing seismic waveform data provided by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology Data Management Center (IRIS-DMC).
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