5 September 2011

Without doubt the most amazing landslide of the year so far – Pingtung County, Taiwan

Posted by Dave Petley

Hat-tip to Chingying Tsou of Kyoto University for the heads up for this, and to the Soil and Water Conservation Bureau in Taiwan, who have provided the information.  They are putting together a report on this landslide, so I will leave the detail to them, but this is a small taster of what is to come.

During the passage of typhoon Nanmadol across Taiwan last week, a large landslide was triggered at Manchou in Pingtung County.  This map Google Earth perspective view shows the location of the landslide:

The coordinates are: Lat 22.038, long 120.803 if you want to look this up.  The mass movement, which is being called the Laufoshan Landslide, failed twice (on 29th and 31st August), with a reported runout distance of 6 km (corrected, but this is unverified at the moment).  Fortunately no-one was killed.

This is the source area of this remarkable landslide:

And this is the landslide track:

I will post a link to the Soil and Water Conservation Bureau information about this landslide as soon as it becomes available.