A quick post today – I thought I’d post a small selection of impressive landslide images that I have come across recently: Ongoing rockslide in India, from here. Landslides resulting from deforestation in Taraza, Antioquia, Colombia, from here. A long runout landslide from Sichuan in China, from here. After effects of a landslide on the island of Ibiza in Spain, from here.

The BBC News website has a short video showing the effects of heavy rainfall in Southern China in mid August. Most notable is a pretty remarkable piece of footage of buildings sliding down a river bank and into the torrents below. You can view it here.

The last few days have been a dreadful period for landslides. I really cannot cover all that has happened in enough detail, so all I can do is to outline the main events: 1. Rotorua rockfall, New ZealandActually the period started with a very lucky escape in New Zealand on Thursday when a rockfall on a slope under maintenance crushed a car with two passengers. Both were trapped but were …

Below is the fatal landslide map for July 2009. Each yellow dot represents a single landslide that killed a person. The background is the etopo1 DEM, with the darker colours representing higher terrain. As usual clicking on the image should provide a high resolution view. The image is a GIF so you should be able to download it, but please acknowledge the source. You will see that in July the …

One of the reasons that the northern hemisphere summer is essentially the global landslide season is that landfalling tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) represent a rather efficient way of triggering slope failures. This is especially the case in the Caribbean, Taiwan, Japan, SE and S China, the Philippines and Vietnam. Typhoon rain is astonishing to experience for the first time – peak intensities of 100 mm per hour are not …

A little late, but here is the map of fatal landslides for June 2009. Regular readers will note a change in the quality of the map (for the better I hope). My achievement of the week is to teach myself GIS from scratch, so that now I can plot the data on decent quality maps. So here it is, plotted on the SRTM digital terrain model (Click on the map …

A few days ago on 3rd July a major landslide occurred in northern Burma (Myanmar) that appears to have affected a huge number of people. The excellent ReliefWeb site is carrying reports of the UN OCHA response to the disaster. The OCHA report states that: “On the 4th of July 2009, a landslide caused by heavy rains swept away a jade miners’ settlement along the Uru River in Hpakant Township …

NASA have provided the first decent overview of the Chongqing landslide via a high resolution satellite image. This can be found here. The morphology of this is decidedly odd – I will spend some time trying understand it better. According to the NASA page the source is to the north and the landslide has moved southwards and then spread out to the southwest. Meanwhile, the search for victims continues according …

The latest update on the Chongqing landslide rescue is provided by Xinhua. Key points: Rescue operations continue, with 3,000 people working on site; Ten small-scale landslides have occurred at the landslide site since Friday; southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality from Friday, and rescuers continued to search for 64 missing for the 10th day on Tuesday. The water level in the barrier lake has dropped to 10 m below the top of …

Xinhua and CCTV have published updates on the Chongqing landslide rescue. The picture is looking increasingly grim given that the estimated survival time of the miners was five to seven days, and it is now a week since the landslide. Highlights of the reports are as follows: Drilling continues but to date no signs of life have been detected. Drilling (or is this tunnel construction – see below) is only …