This week I am giving three presentations in New Zealand – first in Christchurch today, then Wellington tomorrow and Auckland on Thursday. The title of the presentation is Earthquake Induced Landslides – Lessons from Taiwan and Pakistan. The talk is to the various branches of the New Zealand Geotechnical Society and the New Zealand Society of Earthquake Engineering. I have uploaded the presentation to authorstream so that it can be …

I thought it might be interesting to compare the occurrence of fatal landslides in July 2007 in relation to the distribution of rainfall in that month. Let’s start off by looking at the July 2007 fatal landslide map (you will probably need to click on the map to get a decent view of it). As a comparison, below are the statistics for July 2007 and July 2008, followed by the …

As I sit in Terminal 5 at Heathrow, enduring an interminable wait for a flight to Newcastle, I have started to reflect upon the International Symposium on Landslides and Engineered Slopes, and upon the state of landslide science in general. First, the conference conveners should be congratulated for a well-organised meeting. The venue (the Shaanxi Guest House in Xian) was quite good, although I was quite glad that we chose …

In view of the ongoing deep concern about the stability of the >30 landslide dams in Sichuan (now known in the press as “quake lakes”), and in particular the one upstream at Beichuan, I thought it might be helpful to provide a brief review of what we know about landslide dams. First, there us a great deal of literature on this topic. For example, Schuster and Costa (1991) detailed 463 …

Xinhua is today reporting the following:Nearly 9,000 people in a quake zone were evacuated on Tuesday for fear that huge cracks on a mountain could lead to further disasters. Many crevices, measuring up to 1,500 meters long, 250 m high and 50 centimeters wide, have been spotted on the Shiziliang Mountain in the Qingchuan County seat, Guangyuan City, since Sunday, threatening about 50,000 people and quake-relief soldiers. Part of the …

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 …

A nasty landslide this week in Peru triggered some thoughts about the occurrence of landslides that kill the passngers on buses. The event that triggered these thoughts occurred on 6th February when heavy rain dislodged a boulder hit a bus and knocked it into the Tarma River in Junin Province in Peru. Seven people were killed and a further 23 were injured. TV3 news in New Zealand had this picture …