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17 May 2011
Landslide wave video
A link to a Youtube video of a wave generated by a landslide into a waterbody in Washington State, USA
15 March 2011
From a geological perspective, what is surprising about the Sendai Earthquake?
This post explores whether Friday’s magnitude 9 earthquake in offshore Sendai in Japan was a surprising event from a geological perspective, concluding that there are few aspects of this event that have not been observed elsewhere before.
11 March 2011
First reports of the M = 8.9 earthquake in Japan
A first report of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan today
27 October 2010
The Mantawai islands tsunami and the eruption of Mount Merapi in Indonesia
Indonesia is today trying to deal simultaneously with two substantial natural hazards of a rather different nature. The earthquake on Monday 25th October triggered a localised tsunami in the Mentawai islands, close to the epicentre, the Reuters Alertnet reports killed 108 people and has left a further 502 people missing. The data on the earthquake available on the USGS website suggest that this was a Mw=7.7 event at a depth of …
23 March 2010
The Haiti tsunami
The State of the Planet blog, which is the blog of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, reports on an ongoing investigation of the tsunami that killed a small number of people to the west of Port-au-Prince (image below from the National Geographic). The research has involved drilling cores into the sediment on the sea floor near to the tsunami. Their initial analysis suggests that the tsunami was caused by …
3 May 2009
An ancient tsunami in New York
The BBC are running a slightly strange story today about the possibility that the News York area was hit by a tsunami about 2,300 years ago. Given that by far the most likely source of a tsunami is a submarine landslide, this is of some interest. The odd part of this is the timing of the story – I cannot quite work out why it has popped up again now. …
25 January 2009
Two interesting recent landslides
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 …
9 October 2008
Volcanic flank collapse and tsunamis
A few years ago the media got rather excited about a paper that suggested that there was the potential for a giant flank collapse on the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands. A model of the resultant tsunami suggested that it could be sufficiently large to cause huge losses throughout the coastal areas of the North Atlantic. Most scientists now believe that this tsunami was something of an exageration …
30 August 2008
Submarine landslide in southern Africa?
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 …
9 July 2008
Lituya Bay – 50 years on
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). …
Dave Petley is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hull in the United Kingdom. His blog provides commentary and analysis of landslide events occurring worldwide, including the landslides themselves, latest research, and conferences and meetings.
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