30 January 2009

Some interesting landslide sites

Posted by Dave Petley

I thought that it was high time to post a summary of some interesting landslide sites:

Aowanda landslide
There is an interesting youtube video of a smallish progressive rockslide occurring at Aowanda in Taiwan here. It should also be visible below:

Not quite as dramatic as some others, but useful nonetheless.

Five disastrous landslides that changed the Canadian Landscape
There is quite a nice non-scientific piece here that describes in non-technical language five large and significant historic landslides in Canada over the last century or so. Good images!

Rockfall blog
There is an interesting new blog here that looks at measures that can be used to prevent rockfalls. Although it is in Italian, Google Language Tools do a pretty good job of translating the text. I guess one should be a little careful of the fact that it is promoting a company, but there is some nice stuff there.

The largest known landslide?
National Geographic has a nice story here that speculates that a large deposit on Mars might be the debris from a landslide that would have been the size of the United States. Working on Mars must be great because no-one can check your interpretation with field data.

Flashflood footage
It is a fine line between a debris-rich flash flood and a debris flow, so I thought that I would highlight this youtube video of a flash flood in Australia. The first minute isn’t terribly exciting, but stick with it! It should be visible below:

Extraordinary video of the Baldwin Hills dam disaster
There is an excellent video of the collapse of the Baldwin Hills dam in 1963 on youtube here. This is a great illustration of the dangers associated with the formation and collapse of landslide dams. Again, it should be visible below: