Lookig

Weibing Gong presenting results of a regional co-seismic landslide model for the 2020 Puerto Rico earthquake. 

Professor Dimitrios Zekkos and his group, including PhD students Weibing Gong, Parker Blunts, and Mirna Kassem, participated in an expedition in Puerto Rico in May 2022. The expedition included a one-week landslide hazard workshop with colleagues from NASA, USGS, the University of Puerto Rico, and the University of Michigan and a one-week field deployment to collect data for analyzing landslides caused by the 2017 Hurricane Maria and the 2020 Puerto Rico earthquake.

During the workshop, Prof. Zekkos gave a presentation entitled "Regional co-seismic landslide modeling: Inversion and Prediction" and described a new mechanical model for regional landslide analysis and its advantages and applications. Weibing Gong gave a presentation about the applications of the regional landslide model to the analyses of landslides in Puerto Rico. Following the workshop, the UC Berkeley team with the University of Michigan team (Prof. Marin Clark and post-doc Stratis Karantanellis) and the University of Puerto Rico team (led by Prof. Stephen Hughes)  deployed in the field to collect data by conducting multichannel analysis of surface waves (MASW) tests,  Electromagnetic (EM) surveys, as well as UAV mapping with the assistance of Blunts and Kassem.  

The expedition is expected to generate important insights on the causes of landslides caused by hurricanes and earthquakes and assist locals in mitigating landslide hazards. The field data collected is expected to be particularly insightful in calibrating predictive regional landslide model simulations.