Loess is a kind of special soil with porous structure and weak cohesion, which widely deposits in China with an area of 640,000 km(2). Especially, it deposits in the Loess Plateau in China with an area of 440,000km(2) and a thickness ranging from tens meters to more than 500 meters, where is a region with the biggest thickness and the most complicated topography of loess deposit in the globe. On the other hand, the Loess Plateau is a strong earthquake-prone region, where 20 events of Ms=7.0-7.9 and 7 events of Ms=8.0 occurred in history. These earthquakes killed more than 1.4 million people in the region. The field investigation shown that a large scale of landslides, liquefaction and seismic subsidence should be responsible for so large casualties. In this paper, the authors characterized loess deposits relevant to seismic landslides, liquefaction and seismic subsidence with its stratum age, topography, microstructure, gradation, physical parameters and dynamic parameters.
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