First, an apology in advance.  I am just en route to Chengdu in China, where I will stay until Saturday.  Whilst this provides an opportunity to return to Beichuan, which will be very interesting in the context of the rainfall-induced landslides this summer, it presents some other challenges.  The most serious of these is that Blogger is blocked by the Great Firewall of China, so I will not be able …

First, an apology in advance.  I am just en route to Chengdu in China, where I will stay until Saturday.  Whilst this provides an opportunity to return to Beichuan, which will be very interesting in the context of the rainfall-induced landslides this summer, it presents some other challenges.  The most serious of these is that Blogger is blocked by the Great Firewall of China, so I will not be able …

Thanks to David Bressan of the Cryology and Co blog for help in identifying the location of the landslide in Italy today that derailed a train, killing at least nine passengers.  The location is (48.632N, 10.882E) is shown on this Google Earth image:  The landslide was small – only 400 cubic metres – but it doesn’t take much to derail a train if it happens at the wrong time and …

The landslide misery in China continues, despite the strange lack of typhoons to date this summer. The latest incident occurred in Liuzhou City of Guangxi Province when a train struck a landslide and derailed. According to Xinhua four people were killed and 50 others were injured, at least ten of whom were seriously hurt. Xinhua has published a photograph of the aftermath of the incident: Thus it appears that the …

A new paper in the journal Landslides (Xue et al, 2023) examines the triggering of the December 2020 Qingliucun landslide in Sichuan, China.

Planet has captured a beautiful high resolution satellite image of the 11 June 2023 Flüchthorn rock avalanche.

The 4 June 2023 landslide at Yongsheng Township in Sichuan Province, China, which killed 19 people near to a mine site.

Mtauchira: a devastating landslide in Malawi, triggered by Cyclone Freddy, which has killed an estimated 50 people.

Vila Sahy, São Paulo: about 600 mm of rainfall in 12 hours, including a peak intensity of 10 mm/hr, has triggered multiple fatal landslides.

A new open access paper (Shabbir et al. 2022) examines the occurrence and impact of landslides in Pakistan between 2003 and 2019. In total, 1,089 landslides have been identified, of which 180 led to loss of life, with 1,072 people being killed by landslides over this period.