The central part of the Western Andes holds an exceptional concentration of giant paleolandslides involving very large volumes of rock material (v > km3). While those gravitational slope failures are interpreted consensually as an erosional response to the geodynamic activity of the Andes (relief formation and tectonic activity), the question of their triggering mechanisms remains enigmatic. To clarify the respectiveroles of climatic versus seismic forcing on the Andean landslides, new temporal constraints on paleomovements are essential. Here, we focus on one of those giant slope failures, the Aricota giant rockslide that damned the Locumba valley in southern Peru. We conducted fieldwork, high-resolution DEM analysis and cosmogenic nuclide dating to decipher its development history and failure mechanisms. Our results point to the occurrence of two successive events. A giant failure mobi...

In situ-produced 10Be is one of the most commonly used TCN in quantitative geomorphology due to the fact that its production rate is relatively well constrained in the ubiquitous quartz mineral whose integrity minimizes the possibility of contamination by meteoric 10Be. Easily decontaminated from meteoric 10Be, it is in addition reliably measured using the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry technique for which its detection limit is lower than 104 at.g-1. However, volcanic or mafic areas are generally quartz free, which hamper the routine use of 10Be. In the case of a quartz poor lithology, an alternative possibility is to rely on 10Be - feldspars. Two preliminary studies (Kober et al., 2005 and Blard et al., 2013a) already provided promising results, demonstrating that (1) the decontamination protocol classically applied to quartz (Brown et al., 1991) efficiently removes all the meteoric 10B...