Understanding the dynamics of gravitational instabilities is critical to mitigate the associated hazards but their direct observation is often difficult due to their complex nature (remote locations, large variety of volumes and velocities). Recent advances in seismology allow to determine the dynamics of some of the largest landslides on Earth from the very low-frequency seismic waves they generate. However, the vast majority of gravitational instabilities are too small to generate low-frequency seismic waves but generate high-frequency seismic signals. Unfortunately we cannot yet use these high-frequency seismic records to infer dynamics parameters of gravitational instabilities as the physical sources of these waves are not well understood. To better understand the physical processes involved in the generation of high-frequency seismic waves by gravitational instabilities we conducted a controlled rockfall experiment in the Riou-Bourdoux torrent (South French Alps). We deployed a dense seismic network and inferred the dynamics of the block from the reconstruction of the 3D trajectory from terrestrial and airborne high-resolution stereo-photogrammetry. Those datasets include the raw and pre-processed seismic data and kinematics data from the trajectories reconstruction of the controlled rockfall launches.

This work was carried with the support of the French National Research Agency (ANR) through the projects HYDROSLIDE "Hydrogeophysical Monitoring of Clayey Landslides", the Open Partial Agreement "Major Hazards" of Council of Europe through the project "Development of Cost-effective Ground-based and Remote Monitoring Systems for Detecting Landslide Initiation", the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, Project No. 262644. and the Observatoire Multi-disciplinaire des Instabilités de Versant (OMIV) (RESIF/OMIV, 2015).