Disaster triggers disaster: Earthquake triggering by tropical cyclones

Three recent devastating earthquakes, the 1999 M=7.6 Chi-Chi (Taiwan), 2010 M=7.0 Leogane (Haiti), 2010 M=6.4 Kaohsiung (Taiwan), and additional three moderate size earthquakes (6<M<7) occurred in tropical mountainous areas shortly after very wet tropical cyclones (hurricane or typhoon) hit the very same area. The most familiar example is Haiti, which was hit during the late summer of 2008 by two hurricanes and two tropical storms (Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike) within 25 days. A year an a half after this very wet hurricane season, the 2010 Leogane earthquake occurred in the mountainous Haiti's southern peninsula and caused the death of more than 300,000 people. The other cases are from Taiwan, which is characterized by a high seismicity level and frequent typhoon landfall. The three wettest typhoons in Taiwan's past 50 years were Morakot (in 2009, with 2885 mm or rain), Flossie (1969, 2162 mm) and Herb (1996, 1987 mm)[Lin et al., 2010]. Each of this three very wet storms was followed by one or two main-shock M>6 earthquake that occurred in the central mountainous area of Taiwan within three years after the typhoon. The 2009 Morakot typhoon was followed by 2009 M=6.2 Nantou and 2010 M=6.4 Kaohsiung earthquakes; the 1969 Flossie typhoon was followed by an M=6.3 earthquake in 1972; and the 1996 Herb typhoon by the 1998 M=6.2 Rueyli and 1999 M=7.6 Chi-Chi earthquakes. The earthquake catalog of Taiwan lists only two other M>6 main-shocks that occurred in Taiwan's central mountainous belt, one of them was in 1964 only four months after the wet Typhoon Gloria poured heavy rain in the same area. We suggest that the close proximity in time and space between wet tropical cyclones and earthquakes reflects a physical link between the two hazard types in which these earthquakes were triggered by rapid erosion induced by tropical cyclone's heavy rain. Based on remote sensing observations, meshfree finite element modeling, and Coulomb failure stress analysis, we show that the erosion induced by very wet cyclones increased the failure stresses at the hypocenters' depth by 300-1500 Pa, which ultimately triggered these earthquakes. Our findings are supported by a statistical analysis indicating a very low probability (1-5%) for a random earthquake occurrence process to form the observed typhoon-earthquake temporal distribution.