The Meager Creek landslide in British Columbia, Canada on Friday was a very large and very energetic event.  The latest estimates suggest that it had a volume of about 40 million cubic metres, making it one of the largest slides in Canada in recent decades.  Indeed, the Vancouver Sun quotes Rick Guthrie in stating that the slide travelled at 30 metres per second over a distance of 10 km. Some …

The Burgess Shale is probably the World’s most famous assemblage of fossils, made famous in particular by Stephen Jay Gould’s book Wonderful Life. In a nutshell, the shale contains an extraordinarily well-preserved collection of Cambrian marine fossils, now generally considered to be 505 million years old. The morphology of the animals is generally somewhat extraordinary: Walcott Quarry, the site at which the Burgess Shale is exposed, is located in British …

Thanks to Andrew Giles for bringing this one to my attention. Highway 97 in British Columbia is currently being upgraded through the Okanagan Valley (Fig. 1). This project is being undertaken by Arthon – their project website describes this as: “Four lane roadworks and 1,000,000 m3 rock removal over a 7 km section of BC’s main north-south highway corridor. The B.C. Ministry of Transportation awarded Arthon Contractors Inc. a $38.6 …

Good satellite and aerial imagery is now appearing showing the extent of the Joffre Peak rock avalanches in Canada last week

Alongside the continuing Attabad crisis, here is a summary of the last week in landslide events (in no particular order).  The list is not exhaustive by any account, but these are the stories that caught my eye: 1.The Oliver debris flow in CanadaI covered this event in a post or two earlier in the week.  It is now clear that the trigger was the overtopping and eventual failure (through a …

Yesterday I posted in both the ongoing situation at Attabad (and I am glad to say that it now seems likely that the reported landslide at Shimshal was a false alarm) and the mud and debris flow at Oliver in Canada.  It is now reported that the Oliver slide was caused by the failure of an embankment retaining a small irrigation lake.  If that is the case then I assume …

In the last few days there have been two landslides that have led to searches in the hope of finding buried victims. The higher profile slide was this one that occurred in the Bukit Antarabangsa suburb of Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) on Saturday (pictures from The Star): This landslide, which has dominated the news in Malaysia over the last few days, killed four people and injured a further 15. One person …

Blast on the problem slope on Highway 97 (from CBCnews) Attempts to deal with the slope problem on Highway 97 in Canada continue in a quietly controlled manner, and there are now some signs of success. The focus continues to be upon small blasts at the head of the slope to remove material, which is then transferred to the toe to support the mass and to protect the highway. The …