A little under two years ago, on 9th August 2009, Typhoon Morakot triggered a catastrophic landslide that destroyed the village of Hsiaolin in southern Taiwan, killing over 400 people.  I covered this event in detail at the time and later that same year visited the site.  There is a presentation about the typhoon and landslide online that can be downloaded.  The journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Science has just …

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

Thanks to Rick Guthrie for pointing out in a comment another interesting Canadian conference on natural hazards.  This is the 5th Canadian Conference on Geotechnique and Natural Hazards, also known as Geohazards 5, which will be held in Kelowna, British Columbia on 15th to 17th May 2011.   The call for abstracts closes on 29th October, and includes papers on the following: Seismic hazards Flooding and natural dams Landslides Quantitative …

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 …

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 …

The State of the Planet blog, which is the blog of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, reports on an ongoing investigation of the tsunami that killed a small number of people to the west of Port-au-Prince (image below from the National Geographic). The research has involved drilling cores into the sediment on the sea floor near to the tsunami. Their initial analysis suggests that the tsunami was caused by …

For landslide scientists Taiwan has an almost mythical status, effectively being the nearest thing to a landslide laboratory. To my great benefit I have been able to work on landslides in Taiwan since 1991. As well as being a country of great beauty (there are good reasons why the Portuguese named it Ilha Formasa – Beautiful Island – in 1544), the combination of high rates of tectonic uplift, weak rocks, …

At recent edition of Science carries a really intriguing review piece that examines the triggers of the Wenchuan earthquake. Although earthquake triggering is really beyond the scope of this blog, the huge number of devastating landslides that the earthquake induced means that this is of interest. The article can be read online here. The article has emerged from work undertaken at two different locations. Christian Klose of Columbia University presented …

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 …