Richard Tieuw and several of my former colleagues at the Geohazard Reserach Centre at Portsmouth University in southern England have published a nice, short article in EOS looking at issues associated with the generation of tsunamis by coastal landslides. EOS is subscription only, but the article has been covered quite well by New Scientist (available online here), although they look at a particular aspect (see below). First, let’s take a …

A few years ago the media got rather excited about a paper that suggested that there was the potential for a giant flank collapse on the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands. A model of the resultant tsunami suggested that it could be sufficiently large to cause huge losses throughout the coastal areas of the North Atlantic. Most scientists now believe that this tsunami was something of an exageration …

At least 20 people were killed by a mudslide at Kusiong village in the Philippines on Thursday, triggered by Severe Tropical Storm Nalgae. The local people had been drilled to prepare for a storm surge, so sheltered upslope, where they were killed by a mudslide.

The Cochin slide: a new paper published in the journal Landslide describes a 138 km long submarine landslide southwest of India

A remarkable video from the Cumbre Vieja eruption on La Palma shows the high level of mobility of an almost spherical boulder moving on a slope with few obstructions. Indiana Jones could face a greater hazard is Raiders of the Lost Ark is ever remade.

Knappensee: a large landslide at an old open cast mining site in eastern Germany on 11 March 2020, which was captured on video, generated a 1.5 m high tsunami that damaged property on the far side of the lake

Gravity always wins: new research by GNS Science has shown that in New Zealand landslides are more deadly than earthquakes

A massive rockslope failure and 13 km long debris flow near to Bute Inlet in British Columbia, Canada in late November

Hanyuan County: an initial analysis of the 21 August 2020 rainfall triggered landslide in China, which killed nine people

Harrison Lake: a nice paper in the journal Landslides (Hughes et al 2020) describes newly discovered, large, ancient landslide deposits in Canada. The two largest landslides would have been tsunamigenic.