Some new research on the Newmark Displacement Method for earthquake-induced landslides indicates that the method may be on the unconservative side. The Landslide Blog provides a short summary of the paper by Li et al. (2018) that was recently published in the journal Landslides. Their research was based on physical models on a shake table, comparing the results of the model experiments with a Newmark analysis. The paper should be worth a read for geotechnical engineers practicing in seismically active areas. It sounds like some additional study is needed to confirm these results and if they are true, propose different ways of analyzing earthquake-induced landslides.
