The award for the strangest landslide story of the week goes to this one, from southern Africa. Late last week reports started to emerge of strange tidal patterns around the southern Cape of Africa (Fig. 1). Fig. 1: Google Earth image of the southern Cape of Africa, showing the location of St Helena Bay and Plattenburg Bay. In particular, on 21st August at about 8:45 am (local time) a series …

As I sit in Terminal 5 at Heathrow, enduring an interminable wait for a flight to Newcastle, I have started to reflect upon the International Symposium on Landslides and Engineered Slopes, and upon the state of landslide science in general. First, the conference conveners should be congratulated for a well-organised meeting. The venue (the Shaanxi Guest House in Xian) was quite good, although I was quite glad that we chose …

This week is the 10th International Symposium on Landslides and Engineered Slopes, which is a once every four years get together. This time round it is being held in Xi’an in China, which is particularly appropriate given the recent events a few hundred kilometres to the southwest. The organisers managed to timetable a session of two keynotes and six other presentations on landslides associated withe the earthquake. The session was …

At 08:43:46 local time on Saturday 14th June 2008 a magnitude Mw=6.8 (USGS initial estimate) struck eastern Honshu in Japan. Although this earthquake (now being called the Iwate-Miyagi Inland Earthquake) was not particularly large, it occurred at a shallow depth (10 km) below an area that is quite mountainous. This is an areas that is very landslide prone anyway, being subject to active tectonic processes and frequent typhoon rainfall events. …

At 08:43:46 local time on Saturday 14th June 2008 a magnitude Mw=6.8 (USGS initial estimate) struck eastern Honshu in Japan. Although this earthquake (now being called the Iwate-Miyagi Inland Earthquake) was not particularly large, it occurred at a shallow depth (10 km) below an area that is quite mountainous. This is an areas that is very landslide prone anyway, being subject to active tectonic processes and frequent typhoon rainfall events. …

Quite alarming reports started to emerge yesterday that the dam at Tangjiashan might now be “leaking”. For example, a correspondent in Japan, Hideo Ototake, sent me a link to this website, which suggests that a leak started at the bottom of the dam in the afternoon of 1st June. Reuters today is carrying this report, which states that:“The largest “quake lake” formed by China’s most devastating earthquake in decades is …

The BBC is carrying some interesting footage of soldiers creating a channel across a landslide deposit. This can be seen here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7421263.stm The video is at the bottom of the page. It is worth a look. The video shows soldiers digging a channel through what is apparently a landslide deposit. I am not sure which landslide this is or even what the channel is to achieve. It could be that …

In view of the ongoing deep concern about the stability of the >30 landslide dams in Sichuan (now known in the press as “quake lakes”), and in particular the one upstream at Beichuan, I thought it might be helpful to provide a brief review of what we know about landslide dams. First, there us a great deal of literature on this topic. For example, Schuster and Costa (1991) detailed 463 …

NASA has now released new images collected by the FORMOSAT-2 satellite of one of the lakes forming near to Beichuan in Sichuan behind the landslide dam shown in this post (click on the image for a better view).The first image shows a reach of the river upstream of the dam after the earthquake (on May 14th) but before the lake really started to form. The second image shows the lake …

Xinhua is today reporting the following:Nearly 9,000 people in a quake zone were evacuated on Tuesday for fear that huge cracks on a mountain could lead to further disasters. Many crevices, measuring up to 1,500 meters long, 250 m high and 50 centimeters wide, have been spotted on the Shiziliang Mountain in the Qingchuan County seat, Guangyuan City, since Sunday, threatening about 50,000 people and quake-relief soldiers. Part of the …