Landslides sometimes creep for decades before undergoing runaway acceleration and catastrophic failure. Observing and monitoring the evolution of strain in time and space is crucial to understand landslide processes, including the transition from slow to fast movement. However, the limited spatial or temporal resolution of existing landslide monitoring instrumentation limits the study of these processes. We employ distributed acoustic sensing strain data below 1 Hertz frequency during a three-day rainfall at the Hollin Hill landslide and quantify strain-rate changes at meter and sub-minute scales. We observe near-surface strain onset at the head scarp, strain acceleration at a developing rupture zone, retrogression towards the scarp, and flow-lobe activity. These processes with displacements of less than 0.5 mm are undetected using other methods. However, the millimeter processes over three days agree with previously observed seasonal landslide patterns. Here, we show landslide processes occurring with nanostrain-rate sensitivity at spatiotemporal resolution previously not possible.

山体滑坡有时会蠕动数十年，然后才会发生失控的加速和灾难性的破坏。观察和监测应变在时间和空间上的演变对于了解滑坡过程（包括从慢速运动到快速运动的转变）至关重要。然而，现有滑坡监测仪器的空间或时间分辨率有限限制了对这些过程的研究。我们采用霍林山滑坡三天降雨期间频率低于 1 赫兹的分布式声学传感应变数据，并量化米和亚分钟尺度的应变率变化。我们观察到头部陡坡处的近表面应变起始、正在发展的破裂带处的应变加速、向陡坡的回归以及流瓣活动。使用其他方法无法检测到这些位移小于 0.5 mm 的过程。然而，三天内的毫米波过程与之前观察到的季节性滑坡模式一致。在这里，我们展示了在时空分辨率下以纳米应变率敏感性发生的滑坡过程，这在以前是不可能的。