Part two of the series of posts on landslides from the Christchurch earthquake sequence. This post shows rockfalls from the Port Hills area.

Apologies for the low rate of posting this week – it has been a busy one!  These are the key stories that have caught my eye: 1. A Congressional landslide briefing, USA Thanks to Lee Allison (check out his terrific, pioneering Arizona Geology blog) for the heads-up on this one.  On 21st June an event was held in Washington to provide a public briefing on landslides as a stealth hazard.  …

News of two valley-blocking landslides – Attabad in Pakistan and a possible earthquake triggered event in Costa Rica

Dave provides a brief review of the high levels of shaking associated with the M=6.3 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand yesterday, and examines the rockfalls that were the result.

As I noted in my previous post, we are now just entering the global landslide season.  In the last week there has been a marked increase in significant landslides in the Northern Hemisphere.  Clearly, during the summer I won’t be highlighting the vast majority of those that occur, but thought it would be interesting just to draw attention to just a few of those that have happened in the last …

Two articles have been published this week in Science Express, the rapid online version of the journal Science, on the mechanics of the rupture event of the M=9.0 Tohoku-Oki Earthquake in Japan earlier this year.  Both shed some light on the reasons why the earthquake was so immensely damaging.  In the first, Simons et al. (2011) (NB link is a pdf, as the two below) have investigated the magnitude of …

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

GNS Science in New Zealand have been working tirelessly since the Christchurch Earthquake to assess and mitigate the hazards associated with rockfalls induced by the shaking.  They have produced an excellent five-minute video, presented by my former PhD student Chris Massey, which provides an overview of the range of rockfall types, describes the damage that they caused, and outlines the approaches that can be used to deal with them.  The …

A brief article highlighting both the ongoing hazards from the Attabad landslide in Pakistan and a major earthquake in the Himalayas

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