As we are now at the end of the “noughties” I thought that it would be interesting to compile a list of the ten most important “natural” (i.e. geophysical and hydro-meteorological) disasters of the decade. This is not intended to be a list of the ten most damaging or with the highest number of fatalities, but more to reflect events that changed the way that we think or act about …

Below is the presentation file of the keynote lecture that I gave today at the Chilean Geological Congress in Santiago. I have removed a few of the figures as they have not yet been published. You should be able to download and to view the file below: Damage caused by earthquake landslides http://www.authorstream.com/player/player.swf?p=278331_633948356710621250 See more presentations by Dr_Dave | Upload your own PowerPoint presentations The powerpoint file is hosted on Authorstream, which …

It is interesting to note that in all three of the large earthquakes upon which I have worked (1999 Taiwan, 2005 Pakistan, 2008 China), the media has tended to initially focus their coverage upon urban areas, whilst the real story has actually been in the rural hinterland. The reasons for this are complex of course, and include the power of the imagery of people buried / being rescued from buildings. …

In some parts of the world, such as the Seattle area of the USA, wide area landslide warning systems are operated on the basis of rainfall thresholds. These are comparatively simple in essence – basically the combination of short term and long term rainfall that is needed to trigger landslides is determined, often using historical records of landslide events. A critical threshold is determined for the combination of these two …

Whilst the transition towards the Northern Hemisphere summer is rather pleasant for many of us, the start of May also marks the start of the landslide season in the Northern Hemisphere. Of course the main problems kick in when the SW monsoon really gets going in Asia and the tropical cyclone season properly begins in the N. Pacific and N. Atlantic basins, but already there are clear signs that the …

I am just going to write up one session from today’s meeting as it contained the most interesting talks that I heard. This was an annual session on landslides induced by volcanoes and earthquakes, the first three talks of which focussed on the Wenchuan event. Regular readers will know that I am very interested indeed in this event (see here for example). So first up was Ed Harp and two …

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, …

Readers will probably be aware that last week the First World Landslide Forum was held at the United Nations University in Tokyo. This was apparently “a global cooperation platform for all types of organizations from academia, United Nations, governments, private sectors, and individuals which are willing to contribute for landslide and other related earth system risk reduction.”Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend, but two of my colleagues (Nick Rosser and …

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, …

The third anniversary of the Kashmir EarthquakeToday is the third anniversary of the Kashmir earthquake disaster, in which over 79,000 people were killed. Of these, about a third (i.e. about 26,000) were killed either directly or indirectly by landslides. To mark the occasion, the images below, which I took in January 2006, show some of the slope failures that occurred. Whilst Pakistan has undoubtedly put a great deal of effort …