A large group of researchers coming from different universities including the Department of Geosciences of the University of Padua accomplished and published a research aimed at establishing what is exactly the role of temperature changes in influencing the hazard towards landsliding processes before, during and after large earthquakes.

The study, focused on the epicentral region of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, was recently published in Scientific Reports and the main discovery is that temperature seems to play an important role in landsliding but this effect decreases strongly during a strong earthquake and in the immediately following period.

As explained by Filippo Catani, full professor at the Department of Geosciences and co-author of the paper, “the role of temperature in controlling the slope stability is uncertain and has been debated lately even though it is not being considered so much so far in almost every approach to basing scale hazard analysis and prediction”.

“When we go forecasting landslides in the near future also taking into account climate change we always discard temperature as an important variable: this seems quite contradictory because we know that one of the main influences of climate change is temperature change “, he added underlying that “this study will help us in the coming years to better define the predictability of certain phenomena and also the effects of climate change on these extreme events”.