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 …

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 …

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 …

The award for the strangest landslide story of the week goes to this one, from southern Africa. Late last week reports started to emerge of strange tidal patterns around the southern Cape of Africa (Fig. 1). Fig. 1: Google Earth image of the southern Cape of Africa, showing the location of St Helena Bay and Plattenburg Bay. In particular, on 21st August at about 8:45 am (local time) a series …