For this year’s EGU General Assembly I intend to only blog on talks that really catch my eye.  This morning there was a fabulous session on Landslide Forecasting with series of great talks.  Of these,  Samuele Segoni and colleagues presented a very interesting paper on a hugely ambitious project to develop a regional landslide warning system for Tuscany based on rainfall thresholds.  The project appears to be extraordinarily successful – …

In my last post I published two maps of fatal landslide occurrence in the years 2006 to 2008 inclusive, based upon my long term fatal landslide database. In this post I focus on the Asia Pacific region. This analysis does not include seismically-induced landslides, most notably the Wenchuan (Sichuan) earthquake, which triggered a large number of slides, killing over 20,000 people. The basic statistics of the data are in the …

This post presents the data from the Durham University Fatal Landslide database for 2009. First, this is the map of fatal landslides. Each red dot represents a single landslide recorded on the database. Click on the map for a better view in a new window: The map shows the usual distribution. Note the high incidence of landslides in SW India, the Philippines and in java in Indonesia. The high occurrence …

On the flight to San Francisco yesterday I spent some time preparing for one of my AGU presentations – the one on Friday on the impact of landslides on society. I have been looking at my landslide fatality database, which now stretches back for over seven years. There is still some way to go with this to really understand long term trends in fatal landslides, but the dataset is now …

In most years in which I have been collecting landslide fatality statistics (since 2002) November has been a month with quite low landslide occurrence. Not this year though – in fact the last few days have been more like the summer monsoon season, with fatal landslides occurring in a wide range of places. Examples include: El Salvador on 6th November, in which the volcanic lahars triggered by Hurricane Ida appear …

This afternoon at the Chi-Chi earthquake conference in Taiwan the organiser laid on a special session on the impact of Typhoon Morakot in August. This is of great interest to me, given the impact of the landslides, so I thought I’d give summary of the key points. Apologies for the note form – I have done this Twitter-style! 1. The magnitude of the typhoonFor Taiwan this was an extraordinary event. …

The key driver of landslides in S. Asia is the SW (summer) monsoon, which brings prolonged and sometimes heavy rainfall across much of the Indian subcontinent. This year the monsoon has been comparatively weak so far, with only a month or so to go. Indeed, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology maps of the total monsoon rainfall give a picture of considerable rainfall deficit, although it should be noted that …

Here is the fatal landslide map for August 2009. As usual each yellow dot represents a single landslide that killed one or more people: Click on the map for a better (downloadable) view in a new window. The statistics are as follows:Number of recorded fatal landslides: 53Number of fatalities: 782 In terms of fatalities this places August well above the 2002-2008 average (347 fatalities). Of course this is dominated by …

Regular readers will know that I occasionally highlight the great work being undertaken by a small group of concerned citizens, Save the Hills, to raise awareness of landslides in Darjeeling District in northern India. This work is profiled in a blog, Visions of Hell, run by Praful Rao. As this is an area affected by the SW Monsoon, the summer is the main landslide season in this region. Although the …

The web site China.org.cn is reporting a major valley blocking landslide on the Dadu River in Sichuan: “A massive landslide in southwest China’s Sichuan Province has killed at least one person and injured 19 others, local officials said Friday morning. The landslide, which occurred at around 11:30 p.m. Thursday in Shunhe Township of Hanyuan County, also blocked a major local river, leaving six local residents stranded, said officials from the …