The journal Geology has placed online a paper that I have written detailing the global cost of landslides worldwide.  This is the definitive paper (so far) describing the results of my research over the last decade (I started on 1st September 2002, so am nearly at the tenth anniversary).  Ironically, it is likely that today the total number of  in the database, excluding landslides caused by earthquakes, will reach 40,000.

For copyright reasons I am not allowed to publish the paper online, but the publisher’s website for the paper is here.  I have also placed some resources regarding the paper on our FTP site (if the link does not work try this address: ftp://topdog.dur.ac.uk/dnp/geology/ – WordPress seems to mangle the ftp address for some reason), and I am allowed to email a copy of the paper to you (so feel free to email me on: [email protected]

Anyway, this paper covers the period 2004-2010 (i.e. seven full years), and focuses on landslides caused by non-seismic processes (i.e. earthquakes are excluded).  In that period, I have recorded 32,322 deaths in 2,620 landslides.  This is about an order of magnitude more than previous records had suggested.  The dataset includes a map of the fatalities, which indicates where the global hotspots lie. I have produced a colour versions:

There is a high-resolution image of the on the FTP site for you to download as both a TIF and a JPEG.

The global hotspots that emerge for landslides are as follows:

• Along the southern edge of the Himalayan Arc
• Along the coast of southwest India and in Sri Lanka
• Along the southern and eastern coastal regions of China, extending inland ~100 km
• In central China, most notably in the mountains surrounding the Sichuan Basin
• In the mountain chains along the western edge of the Philippine Sea plate
• In the central Caribbean islands
• In a chain that follows the mountains of Central America and South America from Mexico in the north to northern Chile in the south
• In Indonesia, most notably in and around the island of Java

Not in the paper, but I have determined the number of landslides occurring in each of the key landslide countries worldwide.  Remember that this data is for non-seismic landslides, and that it covers the period 2004-2010 inclusive: