Global Patterns of coseismic landslide runout mobility differ from aseismic landslide trends

Coseismic landslides significantly contribute to human and economic losses during and immediately following earthquakes, yet very little data on the runout of such landslides exist. While well-established behavior of aseismic (e.g., hydrologically triggered) landslide runout mobility suggests strong correlation between landslide size and mobility, limited studies of coseismic landslide runout find conflicting mobility trends. We present a global dataset of runout lengths produced from a new automated method for estimating landslide runout, developed and validated using 1726 manually mapped landslides from five unique earthquakes. We then apply the automated runout tool to 23 global earthquake-induced landslide inventories, producing a compiled database of 73,665 measured and estimated runout lengths of coseismic landslides to assess mobility trends. We find a significant divergence between well-established aseismic mobility trends and that of coseismic landslides, with far greater scatter and more complex mobility patterns in earthquake-triggered landslides. As a function of landslide size, we observe global coseismic landslide mobility patterns are bilinear, becoming increasingly less mobile with increasing size above some threshold. This discordance between aseismic and coseismic landslide mobility may be a function of landslide type, kinematics, hydrology, and or setting that systematically differ between triggering mechanisms and should be explored in more depth to develop predictive models of these unique runout patterns. These results suggest hazard and risk models for coseismic landslides may significantly under-predict or over-predict impacts, depending on the size of triggered landslides. • A global dataset of coseismic landslide runout length and mobility is developed from individual landslides. • We find a significant divergence between well-established aseismic mobility trends and that of coseismic landslides. • Coseismic landslide runout behavior is poorly explained by existing empirical runout models for aseismic slides.