2024 Volume 80 Issue 22 Article ID: 23-22017
Although large-scale reconstruction projects were carried out over a wide area in the areas affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake, the amount and spatial distribution of anthropogenic disturbance caused by these reconstruction projects are not clear. In this study, we estimated the spatial distribution of topographic changes caused by reconstruction projects based on the difference in elevation between the DEM immediately after the earthquake and the current DEM. As a result, it was visualized that human-induced landform changes such as elevation changes due to residential land development and raising, and cut and fill due to road construction.The amount of landforms were estimated to be 629 million m3 in Iwate Prefecture and 596 million m3 in Miyagi Prefecture, indicating that the amount of alteration was large in the area from Miyako City to Higashi-matsushima City. The amount of landforms alteration per area using the zoning before and after the earthquake was calculated, and it was found that residential land development was responsible for the large amount of alteration intensity. Although the amount of landform alteration is small compared to other human-caused landform alterations such as open-pit mining and sediment extraction, it is considered to be a large-scale landform alteration because the reconstruction project was implemented over a wide area.