{"id":15104,"date":"2015-05-17T08:04:05","date_gmt":"2015-05-17T08:04:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=15104"},"modified":"2015-05-17T08:04:05","modified_gmt":"2015-05-17T08:04:05","slug":"reports-of-a-massive-ice-rock-avalanche-in-akto-county-xinjiang-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2015\/05\/17\/reports-of-a-massive-ice-rock-avalanche-in-akto-county-xinjiang-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Reports of a massive ice – rock avalanche in Akto County, Xinjiang, China?"},"content":{"rendered":"
A massive ice – rock avalanche in Akto County, Xinjiang, China?<\/h5>\n

The Chinese new agency Xinhua has some rather vague reports this morning<\/a> of a massive “glacier collapse” in Akto County, Xinjiang, China.\u00a0 The reports in the English version<\/a> are somewhat hard to interpret:<\/p>\n

A huge body of glacier has collapsed in China’s Xinjiang, burying more than 100 cattle, crushing dozens of houses and damaging 1,000 hectares of grassland, local government said on Saturday.\u00a0 No casualties has been reported in the Kongur Tiube glacier slide that occurred in the Akto County of the Kizilsu Kirghiz Autonomous Prefecture. About 60 families were evacuated after the 20-kilometer-long and one- kilometer-wide glacier devoured their land.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But a catastrophic collapse that generated a slide 20 km long and one kilometre wide is likely to be an ice – rock avalanche, or perhaps a more conventional landslide.\u00a0 IFENG has a more detailed report in Chinese<\/a>, suggesting that the volume of the collapse might be 500 million cubic metres, and that the deposit is 20 – 50 m think.\u00a0 If so this is a truly enormous event.\u00a0 This report includes an image, but it is far from clear what this represents:<\/p>\n

\"Akto<\/a>

IFENG<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

The IFENG report<\/a> also includes a video, but again it is unclear what this is showing.\u00a0 It does include a sequence from which this still is taken:<\/p>\n

\"Akto<\/a>

IFENG<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

This could be an ice-rock avalanche deposit perhaps?<\/p>\n

This is the Google Earth image of the area affected of Akto County by this landslide:-<\/p>\n

\"Akto<\/a>

Google Earth image of Kongar Tiube<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

This area is in the far northwest of China, near to the border with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, so it is very unlikely that this event is associated with the Nepal earthquake sequence<\/a>.\u00a0 Does anyone have any further information on this landslide?\u00a0 It appears to be a very unusual and interesting event.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chinese news agencies are reporting a huge ice – rock avalanche in Akto County, Xinjiang, China. The reported volume is half a cubic kilometre!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":15106,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[505,16,469,619,866],"class_list":["post-15104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-report","tag-avalanche","tag-china","tag-featured","tag-glacier","tag-ice-rock-avalanche"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}