26 April 2021

The 21 October 1993 Pantai Remis landslide in Malaysia: an upscaled video

Posted by Dave Petley

The 21 October 1993 Pantai Remis landslide in Malaysia: an upscaled video

Early in the days of this blog I posted about an extraordinary video of a landslide in Malaysia.  Almost thirteen years on this video remains hard to beat.  The recording in question shows the 21 October 1993 Pantai Remis landslide in Malaysia.

This was a very unusual failure that occurred in an open cast tin mine near to the coast.  Mining operations ventured too close to the sea, eventually triggering a collapse of the quarry walls.  Ultimately the sea flooded the mine, creating a new cove that is still visible on Google Earth.

The video captures the collapse sequence of the Pantai Remis landslide.  The failures occurred as massive rotational slides that transition into highly mobile flows through liquefaction.  The mine quarry flooded catastrophically and completely.  But the drawback of this video was that the quality was poor.

However, Jaren Christopher Kelley has posted a new version of the video to Youtube.  This has been upscaled from the original, greatly improving the quality.  You should be able to see the video below:

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The image below shows the first rotational failure at Pantai Remis in action:-

One of the rotational failures at the 1993 Pantai Remis landslide in Malaysia.

One of the rotational failures at the 1993 Pantai Remis landslide in Malaysia. Still from a video uploaded to Youtube.

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One of the extraordinary aspects of this video is that it is timestamped, which allows a reconstruction of the sequence of events.

This video remains hard to beat, and the new version makes it much more usable.