A photo gallery of landslides in and around mines and quarries

A brief examination of the new landslide susceptibility map for California

I have I think identified the location of the Taiwan highway landslide today.  Based upon this image (source): The location appears to be here: It appears that the failure has occurred on the cutslope shown in the centre of the image, with the margin of the slide being close to the bridge (which can be seen in the first image on top of the debris).  Thus, it appears to be …

Whilst landslides come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, the fundamental physics that controls material deformation on slopes is the same everywhere. I was reminded of this truism this week when Andrew Giles pointed out a large rockslide that occurred a few days ago, blocking Interstate 40 at Pigeon Gorge in North Carolina, USA. The Citizen-times.com website has a nice report and images of the slide: The images reminded …

For landslide scientists Taiwan has an almost mythical status, effectively being the nearest thing to a landslide laboratory. To my great benefit I have been able to work on landslides in Taiwan since 1991. As well as being a country of great beauty (there are good reasons why the Portuguese named it Ilha Formasa – Beautiful Island – in 1544), the combination of high rates of tectonic uplift, weak rocks, …

This is an update with the latest news about the Nachterstedt landslide. The original post is here. Further information has now emerged about the slide. This is summarised below. 1. The slide occurred in spoil from the mining operations. In a comment in the original post, Florian Jenn (see his blog here) noted that the slide occurred in spoil dumped from earlier mining operations. This is consistent with the pictures, …

I am just in the process of putting together my annual collation of fatal landslide statistics for 2008, together with the map of all the landslides, but in the meantime here are the statistics and map for December. So first the data. I recorded a total of 16 fatal landslides in December, causing 46 fatalities. This is well below the long term average, which 149.8 fatalities. The largest event was …

Given the time of year, I thought I would try to put together ten resolutions that could lead to a decrease in the impact of landslides. They are in no particular order and apply at a range of scales. I would welcome any comments. Before building infrastructure, we should always map the slopes to check for potential or actual landslides. This is not a complex or difficult thing to do, …

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 …

Here are my views of the Sendai landslide conference. The meeting was entitled “The First World Landslide Forum Satellite Conference”, with the theme of “Management of Landslide Hazard in the Asia-Pacific Region”. There were over 200 delegates from more than 30 countries, with many (but not all) Asia Pacific countries represented. The first memorable contribution was the short but sweet keynote by Alexander Strom. It is being argued by some, …