9 January 2013

An interesting Austrian earthflow video

Posted by Dave Petley

In the last few days there has been a number of landslides in Austria caused by heavy rainfall.  The BBC has a short video report that includes a nice piece of footage of a large earthflow inundating a road:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa4vc2feXBQ

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This apparently happened near to Salzburg.  Earthflows are rarely caught on video, so this is a good addition to the collection of available footage.  An interesting aspect of this is the increased rate of movement of the frontal portion as it started to runout.  This may indicate that the material weakened as it remoulded during movement or that the road provided a low friction surface to run across, perhaps?