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. 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.
Dave Petley is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hull in the United Kingdom. His blog provides commentary and analysis of landslide events occurring worldwide, including the landslides themselves, latest research, and conferences and meetings.
It reminds me somewhat of the Island Copper Mine, in British Columbia. The pit extended some 400 m below sea level adjacent to an inlet, and at the end of operations they intentionally breached the pit wall to flood the pit for closure. The pictures are very dramatic, it was for some time the highest salt water waterfall in the world.
The siting is the same as for Island Copper, but there the pit was intentionally (mostly) filled with seawater, then blocked from the ocean and capped with a freshwater layer. Once the pit was (very) stably stratified the bottom water was then driven to anoxia – all of this was part of the remediation plan to deal with acid rock drainage.
This is the same thing as your childhood beach fort getting overrun by the waves. Just on a bit of a larger scale. Just a bit.
I guess landslides are your thing but it is disappointing that I can find anything anywhere about the impact of all of this. This is what was written by the person who took the video according to the YouTube description – “That year, I received a call by the owner of a tin mine. He said that his mine, which had been running for a few decades, was about to collapse. I rushed to the scene with my video camera and waited for a few hours. Finally, I took this valuable footage. Although the footage lasted only a few minutes, it is horribly exciting enough. I hope that this video can let you all appreciate the consequence of ruining our environment”.;
“I hope that this video can let you all appreciate the consequence of ruining our environment”! Why is it so difficult to find updates on that location including environmental impact of the collapse and tin mining in that area or in general.
[The mine was operating illegally, so there are complex factors at play here. D.]