The BBC is reporting that an an angler was killed in a landslide last night in Sandy Bay, near Newbiggin-on-Sea in Northumberland, NE. England. He was reportedly standing at the top of a 15 m high cliff that collapsed, killing him when he fell. This is Sandy Bay:

In August this year a rockfall on a beach in Portugal killed five people and injured four others. Unfortunately the newspapers in the UK are this evening reporting that a similar rockfall occurred today on a beach at Playa de los Gigantes in western Tenerife in Spain, killing a British woman and a local woman. The Telegraph has a report and picture (below) of the incident: Coastal cliffs unfortunately are …

The British newspapers are reporting that overnight a rockfall occurred in Hermitage Cave near to Bridgnorth in Shropshire, England. This is news because at the time there was a group of teenagers camping in the cave. Sadly, one of them was killed and another was badly injured. These caves are old dwellings cut into the Bridgnorth Sandstone (see image below from here): The caves used to be much larger but …

Improvements in the quality of seismic monitoring systems, in addition to increases in the numbers of instruments and better processing techniques have meant that in the last few years it has become increasingly common to detect large rockfall events from their seismic signature. A nice example of this occurred this week. On 28th March a large rockfall occurred from Ahwiyah Point near Half Dome in Yosemite. This is a pretty …

The Colorado Geological Survey publishes a terrific quarterly newsletter on “all aspects of geology throughout the state of Colorado. The latest edition, which is available online for free from here, focuses on rockfalls. It is a terrific read, with some very interesting articles on how and why rockfalls happen; how they can be detected; mitigation approaches; and a number of case studies. It is illustrated with some great photos as …

ChinaDaily is carrying the image below of an large rockfall in a former quarry in Fengshan County of Guangxi Province in China: The accompanying report says that the landslide occurred without warning and without an obvious trigger in a long-abandoned quarry. The volume of the landslide is reported to be 21,000 cubic metres. It buried 300m of road, 16 buildings, two tractors, a car and a motorbike. Sadly, five people …

Geology.com has a spectacular sequence of images of a rockfall in progress in Yosemite National Park that are well worth a look. The images (which are explicitly copyrighted, so I have not reproduced them here) were collected by a well-known photographer, Herb Dunn, in the canyon of the Merced River. The pictures show a fall from what appears to be a previously active rockfall scar. Below the scar there is …

The terrible landslide at El Doweiqa in the Manshiet Nasser slum in Cairo (see earlier posts here and here) continues to shock. The death toll has now reached 45 people, with many more still buried in the debris. News reports suggest that there is growing dissatisfaction with the response of the authorities in Egypt. To be fair, relatives in disasters such as this are often very frustrated at the speed …

Reports today suggest that an interesting landslide problem in New Zealand has finally come to a close. The location of the problem was the Shotover River in Otago, which is a little to the north of Queenstown on South Island. Shotover is famous as an extreme sports location – in particular jet-boating on the Shotover River, white water rafting and a canyon swing (a sort of bungee jump I think) …

In 2006 Hans Rudolf Keusen of Geotest raised concerns that a large pillar on the Eiger mountain in Switzerland had become unstable. Over the next few weeks the pillar did indeed progressively fail, providing some amazing images of a large rockfall in action (Fig 1): Figure 1: AP image entitled: On July 13, 2006, masses of rock fell down from Eiger, near Grindelwald. The event came after days of warnings …