USGS Science⌕ Search
Home/Archive/USGS

USGS · sim3503

Landslides triggered by the 2016–2017 storm season, eastern San Francisco Bay region, California

Skye C. Corbett·Brian D. Collins
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Discussion The winter rainy season of 2016–2017 brought abundant rainfall to the State of California and to the San Francisco Bay region. In January and February of 2017, intense rainfall from strong winter storms saturated soils in the region and triggered thousands of shallow landslides. The highest concentration of these landslides was in the eastern part of the bay region, where landslides in the hills east of the Cities of Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland, Hayward, and Fremont (see main map for locations) damaged homes, displaced a major electrical transmission-line tower, and blocked several heavily traveled roadways. This map shows 8,928 landslides manually mapped from rectified high-resolution (0.25-meter [m]) satellite imagery (March 11, 2017, from Google Earth) in a three-dimensional geographic information system (GIS) framework. The map area encompasses approximately 1,050 square kilometers (km 2 ), bounded by the Carquinez Strait and San Francisco Bay to the north and west, respectively, and extending to the Interstate Highway 680 corridor to the south and east. Individual landslides were mapped as polygons, but for ease of display, they are shown here as points denoting the highest elevation of each landslide headscarp. The greatest calculated landslide concentration (measured as the total number of landslides per unit area) exceeded 80 landslides per 0.25 km 2 in the hills east of the City of Berkeley. This zone is illustrated on the map in red, a color which denotes areas of greater than or equal to 30 landslides per 0.25 km 2 . The source area and deposit polygon datasets are available as a data release (Corbett and Collins, 2023). Complementary field investigations at more than 150 landslides of those displayed here indicate that most mapped landslides are shallow (less than 1 m deep) debris slides and debris flows. Although most landslides occurred in undeveloped areas (for example, parks and open space), about 1,400 landslides, or 16 percent of the total number, affected structures or infrastructure (including paved and dirt roads) in some way. The inset figures (figs. 1–5) show photographs taken in January and February 2017 that depict some areas of damage that occurred during and after the storms; the locations of where these photographs were taken are shown on the map. In the San Francisco Bay region, landslides usually take place each year during the winter rainy season, but widespread, intense rainfall events such as those whose effects are depicted here typically occur as a result of considerably above-average precipitation conditions. Although the landslides of early 2017 are not the most damaging to affect the region historically, they are still a potent reminder of the potential for landslide hazards present in the San Francisco Bay region.

Explore related subjects

Scientific Investigations MapReport
90° N90° S · 180° W ← longitude → 180° E
Source-reported bounding extent: 37.551159813602936° to 38.06908335518102° latitude; -122.43406280030648° to -121.86773652737136° longitude. This indicates report coverage, not an exact sampling location. View area on OpenStreetMap.

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Skye C. Corbett, Brian D. Collins. 2023-05-23. Landslides triggered by the 2016–2017 storm season, eastern San Francisco Bay region, California. https://doi.org/10.3133/sim3503

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related USGS reports

USGS2026

Altitude of the potentiometric surface and depth to water in the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer, spring 2024

Potentiometric-surface and depth-to-water maps for spring 2024 were created for the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer using groundwater-altitude data from 1,151 wells completed in the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer and from the altitude of the top of the water surface in area rivers from 160 U.S. Geological Survey and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers streamgages. The potentiometric-surface and depth-to-water maps for 2024 were created to support investigations to characterize the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer as part of the U.S. Geological Survey Water Availability and Use Science Program. Sufficient data were available to map the potentiometric surface and depth to water of the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer for spring 2024 for about 83 percent of the aquifer area. The potentiometric contours ranged from 0 to 330 feet (ft) above the North American Vertical Datum of 1988. The regional direction of the groundwater gradient was generally to the south-southwest, except in areas of groundwater-altitude depressions, where the groundwater gradient direction was into the depression, and near rivers, where the groundwater gradient direction was either from the aquifer to the river or from the river into the aquifer. Groundwater depressions in the potentiometric-surface map are in the lower one-half of the Cache region and in most of the Grand Prairie and Delta regions. Depth to water by well in the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer in spring 2024 ranged from 0.27 ft above land surface to 145.65 ft below land surface.

Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississip↗
USGS2026

Color-Shaded Relief Bathymetry of Lake Chelan, Washington

In 2023, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) completed a 3-week field operation in Lake Chelan, Washington, the third deepest lake in the conterminous United States, to acquire sediment cores, high-resolution bathymetry data, and chirp sub-bottom profiles. The high-resolution bathymetry displayed in this map publication was collected using a Norbit Winghead i67-curved array multibeam system; raw data were cleaned and gridded (3 by 3 meters [m]) in the Teledyne CARIS software. In some locations where the slopes of Lake Chelan are near-vertical, multibeam returns were sparse, resulting in artifacts resembling holes that appear as grey dots within the color-shaded bathymetric relief. Although the 2023 bathymetric mapping of Lake Chelan resulted in similar morphometric characteristics to previous hydrographic campaigns (table 1; Kendra and Singleton, 1987; Pelletier and others, 1989), these new data provide a much more detailed understanding of the two physiographic basins that comprise Lake Chelan: the deeper (as deep as 445.8 m [fig. 1]; previously reported as 453 m) and narrower (1–2 kilometers [km] wide) Lucerne Basin to the north, and the shallower (as deep as 127.8 m [fig. 1]), and wider (2–3 km wide) Wapato Basin to the south. With this detailed imaging of Lake Chelan, we find pervasive morphological evidence of slope failure and mass-transport deposits (MTDs) in at least 89 locations within the lake and 63 subaqueous deltas (fig. 2). The deeper Lucerne Basin is dominated by steep slopes and numerous subaqueous deltas fed by steep fluvial catchments, whereas the Wapato Basin contains numerous landslide scarps, scars, and debris aprons along the more gently sloping lake margins, and abundant relict kettle structures from the Pleistocene deglaciation. Lake Chelan’s geomorphic, geophysical, and sediment data contain important records of glacial retreat and advance, regional volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes that generate ground motions severe enough to induce landslides recorded in the sediment as MTDs. The epicenter of the 1872 Washington State Earthquake (M 6.5–7.2; Bakun and others, 2002; Brocher and others, 2017; Sherrod and others, 2021) is along the Spencer Canyon Fault, near the southern end of Lake Chelan. Shaking from this earthquake was strong enough to affect local aquifers, induce liquefaction of unconsolidated sediments, produce large seiches (Brocher and others, 2018), and likely cause landslides within Lake Chelan.

Washington↗