I am starting a second thread here to document landslides reported in the Sichuan earthquake. Background information about landslides and the earthquake is provided in the post below. I will update this list as new information becomes available. I would really welcome any information that can be provided – please email me ( [email protected] ) or post a comment. General observation: as feared, landslides have taken a terrible toll in …

I thought a thread showing some news images of landslides triggered by the Sichuan earthquake would be useful. The first image shows vividly the likely impact of landslides in this area. AP photo entitled “Buildings are destroyed by landslides following Monday’s powerful magnitude 7.9 earthquake in Beichuan in Mianyang city in southwest China’s Sichuan Province Tuesday, May 13, 2008. A signboard atop the building at left reads: Beichuan Hotel” Xinhua …

It is now clear that very substantial numbers of landslides have been triggered by the earthquake in China. Continued landslide activity will be a very major problem during periods of heavy rain. Unfortunately the forecast is not good for the next few days. Xinhua reports: “Three rains are forecast to sweep earthquake-hit southwest China’s Sichuan, southern part of Gansu and Shannxi provinces and Chongqing Municipality in the next seven days, …

12th May @ 07:27 UT: News reports this morning are suggesting that there has been a large, shallow earthquake in Sichuan Province, China. Initial estimates from the USGS are that this was a M = 7.5 (NB this has now been corrected to MW=7.9) event located at just 10 km, although clearly this will need updating. If so, it is reasonable to assume that this earthquake will have triggered large …

There is news emerging this morning of a magnitude 6.8 earthquake in New Zealand today. The earthquake was situated just offshore the east coast of North Island. It is clear that the town of Gisborne has suffered some damage, though at least initially casualties appear to be light. An earthquake of this magnitude is sufficiently strong to cause landslides, and New Zealand is a landslide-prone terrain, so it will be …

A new paper in the journal Nature (Lavé et al. 2023) describes the 23 cubic km Sabche rockslide in Annapurna, Nepal, which occurred about 850 years ago.

The 27 June 2023 landslide at Miansi, Sichuan Province, China, which is reported to have killed at least seven people.

A new paper (Rosi et al. 2023) in the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences presents a landslide susceptibility map for Central Asia.

Planet has captured a high resolution Skysat image of the valley-blocking coseismic landslide near Islahiye, Turkey.

Landslides as a dominant landscape process on icy satellites The journal Icarus has a very interesting new paper (Mills et al. 2023) that considers why some icy satellites of large planets, such as those orbiting Jupiter and Saturn (in particular Ganymede, Europa, and Enceladus), have smooth surfaces with very few impact craters.  There is a good plain English summary of this work on the Interesting Engineering website too.  Conventionally, the …