5 December 2010

Dramatic footage – coastal landslides in Canada and a snow avalanche in Edinburgh!

Posted by Dave Petley

Another excellent video of landslides in action has appeared on Youtube, this time showing the results of coastal erosion in Newfoundland, Canada.  I don’t know much more about the location or the timing of the events – can anyone fill in the details?

The video should be viewable here and embedded below:

Whilst the house falling over the cliff at the start is undeniably dramatic, for me the most interest part is the video of the slip at the end of the sequence.

Meanwhile, the BBC has quite a nice piece of footage of a snow slide from the roof of the Scottish Widows building in Edinburgh on Friday.  I can’t embed this at the moment, but it is viewable here.  There are a couple of really interesting aspects to this.  First, the dynamics of the motion are fascinating, and in particular the way that the whole mass mobilises at once, rather than coming down in small sections.  Second, even though the volume here is really quite small the movement of air that the slide generated is well-shown by the fine snow particles at road level: