Beaulieu, Olivia2018-11-282018-11-282018-08https://hdl.handle.net/11299/201022University of Minnesota M.S. thesis. August 2018. Major: Earth Sciences. Advisor: Andrew Wickert. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 40 pages.Landslides are a significant natural hazard, shape steep hillslopes, and change rivers and their habitats. Field inventories are used to produce snapshots of landslide distributions, but the temporal windows of these studies are either short or poorly-defined, and in the latter case may not represent the initial distribution. Furthermore, these data sets typically constrain landslide area but not volume. Here we respond to the need to understand the long-term statistics of landsliding by building an experimental sandbox in which an incising and laterally-migrating river produces landslides by undercutting banks of moist sand. The forms of both the landslide area–frequency distribution and the landslide area–volume relationship are identical to those from analyses of field data. These data demonstrate that it is possible to produce landslides at scale in a physical model with a realistic driver, and that this approach can elucidate first-order controls on the statistics of landsliding.enlandslideslandslide statisticsphysical experimentThesis or Dissertation