In the past week China has suffered two rather extraordinary landslide accidents at hydroelectric plants. The first occurred an 20th July 2009 near to the Xiaowan hydroelectric power station in Yunnan province. The dam, shown in the artist’s impression below, will apparently be the world’s tallest arched dam, standing 292 m high when finished. It is still under construction, with the first turbine expected to be operational later this year: …

In July 2003 a landslide occurred on the Pareechu stream at 32.322N, 78.735E, a remote tributary of the Satluj River in Tibet (see Fig. 1). The landslide was quite large, blocking the river and allowing a lake to form that eventually breached. In this post I will try to use the range of satellite imagery and reports that are now available to describe the sequence of events. Fig. 1: Google …

The landslide elements of Day 2 at EGU were split between two sessions on landslide forecasting and two on landslide risk. The latter is of comparatively little interest to me, and I had a load of work to do and meetings to attend, so I only attended the morning sessions. In terms of landslide forecasting, there was some pretty good stuff presented. I would say that some speakers need to …

It is not often that one reads a paper and finds a new and exotic landslide mechanism being suggested. I was somewhat surprised yesterday to find that in a paper just published in Geomorphology, Steve Evans and his co-authors have done just that. Although it requires further research, the mechanism is intriguing and undoubtedly has some very interesting implications for glacial hazard management as well. The origin of the theory …

Thanks to both David Hopkins and Ripendra for drawing my attention to a landslide on Friday on the Mahakali River on the border between Nepal and India. Although it has occurred in a remote area, it is interesting because the landslide appears to have partially blocked a fairly large river coming down from the high Himalayas. The landslide occurred in the Chautuldhar (Chetalkot) area of Rephalikot, close to Tawaghat in …

Two interesting landslides to report in the last few days. 1. Landslide in Iztapalapa, Mexico CityOn Thursday morning a 50 cubic metre landslide in the Itzapalapa, a poor suburb of Mexico City slid onto a house at the toe of the slope, killing two people. Chinagate has published a rather dramatic picture of the site: The interesting thing about this image is the very large (apparently 5 m high) retaining …

For some 12 or so years I have maintained a set of notes on the amazing Vajont (sometimes spelt Vaiont) landslide of N. Italy. This is the most deadly landslide in Europe in recorded history. For a while I have been meaning to move the notes over to here – today I have finally got around to it, so here they are: THE VAJONT LANDSLIDEIntroductionThe Vajont reservoir disaster is a …

In the last few days there have been two landslides that have led to searches in the hope of finding buried victims. The higher profile slide was this one that occurred in the Bukit Antarabangsa suburb of Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) on Saturday (pictures from The Star): This landslide, which has dominated the news in Malaysia over the last few days, killed four people and injured a further 15. One person …

Many thanks to reader Ripendra for alerting me to the following, and indeed for doing nearly all the work for this post. The 14th June 2008 earthquake in Japan is known to have triggered a number of landslides, as per earlier posts, but the most notable appears to have occurred at Aratozawa Dam in Miyagi prefecture. The Aratozawa Dam (Figure 1) is a rockfill dam used for flood control, irrigation …

Two days ago I posted this picture AP image of the channel at Tangjiashan: AP image captioned: Water from the Tangjiashan “quake lake” flows down a landslide site in the quake-devastated Mianyang City, southwest China’s Sichuan Province. Today, the following Reuters image has been released, apparently showing the same location: Reuters image entitled: Water flows through a sluice channel of the Tangjiashan quake lake in Tangjiashan, Sichuan Province June 8, …