A brief review of 201 forecasts for large-scale weather phenomena that are associated with landslides during the northern hemisphere summer

The world of landslides is rather busy at the moment, and we are only just coming into the main landslide season.  I thought I’d post a a few landslide-related items that have caught my eye over the last week: 1. A fatal rockfall in Scotland A woman climber was killed on the Sgurr Alasdair in the Cuillin mountains on the Isle of Skye on Tuesday when she was struck on …

A review of the current state of play at Attabad as the lake level rises once again during the snowmelt season.

A link to the paper and powerpoint presentation for my talk on the Attabad landslide at the Geohazards 5 conference in Kelowna, Canada today.

A small number of photos of the state of the earthquake affected areas in Sichuan Province, China.

This post provides details of an analysis of the loss of life from landslides triggered by earthquakes. It is based on a presentation to be given at the International Symposium on earthquake induced landslides in Chengdu this morning. A full PDF of the presentation is available on the site.

Mega cities often receive all the attention when it comes to earthquake risk reduction activities, but what about rural communities living in seismically active areas? As the recent earthquakes in Kashmir, Pakistan and Sichuan, China have shown, rural populations are vulnerable not only to the shaking but also the secondary hazards associated with earthquake events. In this blog post series, Katie Oven and Nick Rosser summarise a scoping study funded by the NERC and ESRC which focuses on rural communities specifically and explores how science and local knowledge can be combined to build resilience at the local level.

I have finally managed to process the 2010 data in my database on lives lost from landslides around the world. This post presents a summary of the findings.

There is a great deal of discussion in the landslide community as to whether trends in landslide occurrence are upwards. Data from the Interb=national Landslide Centre database for the last seven years are used to show that the number of landslides that kill people in Asia appears to be increasing, whilst the number of people killled shows a far less clear trend, but may be dominated by the effects of El Nino events.

The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China remains the defining landslide event of the last three decades.  To commemorate this event, the State Key Laboratory of Geo-hazard Prevention (SKLGP) at the Chengdu University of Technology are organising a symposium entitled: An International Symposium on Earthquake Induced Landslides and Disaster Mitigation at the 3rd Anniversary of the Wenchuan Earthquake This will take place in Chengdu, China from 11th to 15th May 2011, including two …