The Mw=7.2 earthquake on the Laguna Salada fault in Mexico on Sunday was certainly sufficiently large and shallow (10 km) to generate landslides, and there are areas of mountains that provide enough relief for slides to develop.  To date the number of reports of slides is quite limited, but CNN has this amazing amateur footage of the mountains to the south of Mexicali.  The huge dust clouds were almost certainly …

The mainstream media is reporting a story this morning that breeding toads in Italy apparently relocated from their nests five days before last year’s L’aquilla earthquake in Italy. This is picking up on a paper published in the Journal of Zoology today by a team from the Open University. The paper examines toad numbers at San Ruffino lake, 74 km from the earthquake focus: The authors observed that on 28th …

Yesterday I gave a talk to the Manchester branches of the Geographical Association and the Geological Association on the causes of the Sichuan (Wenchuan) earthquake disaster. As usual I promised to make my slides available via Authorstream. You should be able to download the presentation as well as viewing it below.: 10_03 Manchester 1 http://www.authorstream.com/player/player.swf?p=346062_634038962411343750 See more presentations by Dr_Dave | Upload your own PowerPoint presentations

Thanks to Lynn Highland for the heads-up on this one. The French language website cyberpresse.ca has an article describing a valley blocking landslide triggered by the Haiti earthquake. The translation says: “The dam is large and there are still several tens of metres before the water passes over it. The problem is that it has hardly rained since the earthquake of January 12. When the rainy season triggers, a few …

The Discovery Channel has news of a very interesting example of rapid coastal erosion driven by the earthquake in Haiti. The site is at Petit Paradis to the west of Port-au-Prince. Eye-witness reports suggest that the town was struck by a highly localised tsunami in the earthquake, apparently killing 20. This is interesting in part because it is quite likely such a localised event would have been caused by a …

Google have now released an even higher resolution set of satellite images of Port-au-Prince, this time collected using the IKONOS instrument. These images have an extraordinary level of resolution – about 15 cm – meaning that the images are spectacular. This allows us to get a better understanding of the liquefaction damage at the port, the subject of my earlier post. So, this is a close up of the damage …

As the Haiti disaster moves from the rescue phase into stabilisation and the initial component of recovery, the media are running out of miracle survival stories and tales of looting. This means that they are now looking for other stories to tell, and in particular are starting to focus on both the plight of communities outside of Port-au-Prince and on detailed eye-witness accounts. Interestingly, this is starting to suggest that …

NASA has today released an image, partly obscured by cloud, of the upland area to the south of Port-au-Prince. This is the area that received the highest levels of shaking and, given the terrain, was most likely to have suffered slides. The image is available here: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12495 and a comparison with an image taken in 2008 is here:http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=42333 Note that this area suffered heavy rainfall in the 2008 hurricane season. …

Following up on my post yesterday on the nature of the liquefaction damage to the main container port in Port-au-Prince, CNN has a video from the site. The video is here:http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/15/haiti.harbor/index.html The recording appears to have been shot in this area (this is the post earthquake Google Geoeye imagery): The video clearly shows the liquefaction features, the collapsed wharves and the damaged cranes and notes how much work is needed …

AFP is reporting that an earthquake struck Guanling, Zhenfeng and Zhenning districts in Guizhou province at 09:35 UT yesterday (Sunday), triggering two landslides that have killed seven people and left one person missing. Other news agencies are reporting that one of the landslides struck a boat on a river. The peculiar thing about this is that the earthquake appears to have been very small indeed. The USGS does not have …