Below is my presentation from the conference in Taiwan. The file is on authorstream (my authorstream page is here – there are several of my presentations there). You should be able to play or download the presentation below or from the authorstream site. As ever, please acknowledge anything that you use from it. The paper was a review of the key things that we have learnt from research into landslides …

The Chi-Chi earthquake struck Taiwan on 21st September 1999. To remember that event, a range of organisations in Taiwan have organised a scientific conference aimed at sharing the lessons learnt from the earthquake. I was lucky enough to be invited to speak on landslides triggered by the event – my paper is tomorrow – but I thought I would also post on some of the most interesting presentations as they …

Regular readers will know that one of my interests lies in trying to get a better understanding of the loss of life associated with landslides. A key realisation of this work for me has been that earthquake-triggered slides cause a very substantial proportional (probably in fact the majority) of fatalities is mass movement events. Unfortunately our understanding of seismically-driven landslides, and their impacts, remains poor, certainly in comparison with rainfall …

A large (Mw = 7.0) earthquake struck offshore Java in Indonesia today at 07:55 UTC (2:55 am local time). USGS has a location map (below) and earthquake parameters, a shake map, etc here. AP is reporting that a large landslide was triggered in Rawa Hideung village, Cianjur district in Java: “Antara reported that 12 families, or about 30 people, were trapped in houses buried by the landslide in Rawa Hideung …

GNS Science in New Zealand have released details of the mapped landslide distribution from the Fiordland earthquake on 15th July. As I noted a day later, the number of landslides appears to be surprisingly low: The earthquake produced only 187 landslides, most of which were shallow and comparatively small. The area affected by landslides was 5600 square kilometres. Comparison with the graph below (see my original posting) suggests that this …

Every so often an event occurs to shake up out of our complacency. So often this is a disaster that is mind-bogglingly destructive, such as the Wenchuan Earthquake landslides last year. However, just occasionally something that happens that is far less damaging than would be expected. This of course is easier to ignore, but in fact can be just as informative as the big events. Yesterday is just such a …

Yesterday there was a special session of the Sinorock Conference in Hong Kong, focused on the Wenchuan Earthquake. This involved six presentations and then a lively round-table discussion. This is a brief review. The first talk was given by colleagues from Chengdu University of Technology on the topic of the landslides triggered by the earthquake. This was visually spectacular, emphasising the scale, density and impact of the landslides that were …

Today there was a session on the Wenchuan Earthquake at the Sinorock conference in Hong Kong. I was invited to participate in the panel discussion, for which I put together the following presentation highlighting a few critical issues: http://www.authorstream.com/player/player.swf?p=191786_633785600804989257Uploaded on authorSTREAM by Dr_Dave You should be able to review the presentation above or to download it the Powerpoint file if you wish (from here if necessary). I will write a …

Driving home from work last night, and bored with listening to endless discussions on the radio about the ways in which politicians use the system to personal gain, I started pondering what we have learnt from the Wenchuan Earthquake a year ago. The media yesterday understandably focused on collapsed schools. We have known for years that critical buildings in earthquake zones need seismic reinforcement, so this is hardly new. These …

No words can do justice to the first anniversary of the Wenchuan (Sichuan) earthquake, so I won’t even try. Instead I post these pictures as a silent memorial to the victims.