Rainfall up, mountain down?

PAOLINI, L.; VILLALBA, R.

Tree Rings and Natural Hazards: A State-of-the-Arts

Springer

Lugar: Jena; Año: 2010; p. 121 - 125

Dendrochronological dating was used to reconstruct landslide occurrence along a 300 km stretch of the mountain ranges of NWA during the past 50 years. We used a combination of three dendrochronological techniques to date landslide occurrence. The minimum age for a landslide was established by dating Andean alder (Alnus acuminata) trees growing on the landslide scar and its deposits. The age of the oldest tree growing on the new surface provides an estimate of the minimum agefor the deposit. The occurrence of a disturbance can also alter the ring-width patternof trees growing along the landslide scar, causing suppression or growth release events. The recorded changes in tree-ring patterns were also used for dating landslide events. In addition, we dated trees killed by landslides as a complement to the event chronology. The accuracy of the dendrochronological techniques used in our  study was validated on landslides of known age. Finally, the landslide chronologies were compared with regional precipitation records in order toestablish the relationship between landslide occurrence and precipitation fluctuations over time.