Regular readers will know that one of my interests lies in trying to get a better understanding of the loss of life associated with landslides. A key realisation of this work for me has been that earthquake-triggered slides cause a very substantial proportional (probably in fact the majority) of fatalities is mass movement events. Unfortunately our understanding of seismically-driven landslides, and their impacts, remains poor, certainly in comparison with rainfall …

The seasonal landslide pattern in South Asia remains very substantively below the long term mean this year – to date at least the monsoon is failing. The level of the problem is illustrated rather well by this map of the monsoon season rainfall anomaly for India, from Monsoon Online: The result is that the number of landslides in South Asia is very much below average, which is of course good …

There is a very interesting paper being published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Dan Sandweiss, Ruth Shady, Mike Moseley, Dave Keefer and Charles Ortloff. This paper, which is reported in a long press release from the University of Florida, combines archaeology, geology and geomorphology to look at the collapse of the Supe civilisation in Peru, which survived for a couple of millennia in …

Day 2 of EGU had less of interest to me than Day 1. I started out in the Historical Landslides session, in which my paper was the first. Most of the other five presentations were excellent. Notable amongst these was a paper by Jan Klimes and his colleagues on the landslide threat to Macchu Micchu. In recent years there have been some fairly lurid headlines about the threat to Machu …

Over the next few days I will try to write up some comments on issues that arise at the landslides sessions at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna. EGU is a massive meeting (c. 10,000 earth scientists), and the natural hazards section is one of the largest. The landslide field is the biggest component of natural hazards, so there is usually something for everyone. In total there are …

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 …