You'll never believe why the side of this mountain fell off!

Despite its age, the southern Appalachian orogen maintains rugged topography across portions of all of its lithotectonic provinces. As a result, southern Appalachia experiences landslides and rockfalls on slopes underlain by both flat-lying and tilted sedimentary rocks, highly deformed metamorphic rocks, and plutonic rocks, as well as by thick colluvial deposits derived from bedrock upslope.
Recent LiDAR datasets have revolutionized mapping and visualization of slope movements in this complex landscape, revealing trends in failure behavior associated with site- or region-specific geologic conditions. Understanding these trends, in turn, is central to improving risk reduction, event response, and long-term planning. Fieldwork remains a critical step in maximizing benefits of the LiDAR datasets, with ground-truthing of LiDAR imagery observations allowing more accurate future remote sensing work.
As Appalachia's geographic position makes its road networks and infrastructure critical to a much larger area, continued efforts to map and understand landslides past, present, and future in the region are fundamental to broader national interests.
This talk will show how LiDAR and traditional field methods have been applied in a wide variety of settings throughout southern Appalachia, from the Blue Ridge Escarpment to the Cumberland Plateau.
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USGS video: www.usgs.gov/m...