Two interesting landslides to report in the last few days. 1. Landslide in Iztapalapa, Mexico CityOn Thursday morning a 50 cubic metre landslide in the Itzapalapa, a poor suburb of Mexico City slid onto a house at the toe of the slope, killing two people. Chinagate has published a rather dramatic picture of the site: The interesting thing about this image is the very large (apparently 5 m high) retaining …

Tropical Cyclone Nargis montage from the Brisbane Times Swiss Re Sigma has just released its initial statistics on losses in catastrophes in 2008. Of course it is important to understand that reinsurance look at catastrophes in a particular way, meaning that the statistics are weighted in particular to low frequency – high magnitude events, rather than iterative processes, and to losses causing a high level of financial loss. There is …

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 …

Fifty years ago today, on the 9th July 1958, one of the most remarkable landslide events in recorded history occurred in Alaska. This was the Lituya Bay landslide, a large rockslide that collapsed catastrophically into a fjord in Alaska. Whilst the landslide itself was comparably unexceptional, though very large, the tsunami that it triggered most certainly was not. Lituya Bay is located in the very southwest of Alaska (Figure 1). …

I spent the morning in the session on the Characterization, monitoring and early warning related to large landslides. I was struck during the presentations by the degree to which the technologies for monitoring landslides have improved over the last decade or so. For example, Casagli and his colleagues gave a very polished presentation on the application of their ground-based radar LISA to the monitoring of the Ruinon landslide near to …