Monitoreo de movimientos de ladera en el sector de San Pedro de Vilcabamba mediante procedimientos GPS

Abstract

Landslides often affect large areas, developing latent due to the slowness of the internal dynamics and in most cases only notable by geomorphologic evidences such as soil fissures, which in several cases can be the reflection of other processes. Triggered by extreme rainfall passive potential landslides can convert quickly to active landslides causing huge economic losses, which can be accompanied by loss of human life. Landslide control, consisting in the collection of data to predict the behavior of slopes in time, does not yet exist in Ecuador. According to international literature, surveying the activity of the surface of potential landslide areas using GPS as monitoring technique permits to understand the limits, size, level of activity, direction and velocity of earth movement. In this paper, the technique was applied to quantify the movement of a landslide area in the San Pedro sector of Vilcabamba, southern Ecuador.