{"id":16025,"date":"2015-09-08T05:00:02","date_gmt":"2015-09-08T05:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=16025"},"modified":"2015-09-08T02:01:46","modified_gmt":"2015-09-08T02:01:46","slug":"portland-progressive-failure-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2015\/09\/08\/portland-progressive-failure-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Portland: progressive failure at Weare Cliffs"},"content":{"rendered":"
Portland<\/h5>\n

One of the most landslide prone areas of the UK is Dorset (which incidentally is also one of my favourite parts of the world).\u00a0 It has a series of very large, very well developed landslides<\/a>, as well as numerous rockfall sites on steep cliffs<\/a>.\u00a0 Most landslide fatalities in the UK in recent years have occurred in Dorset (for example this one<\/a> and this one<\/a>).\u00a0 The Isle of Portland is a geologically fascinating area of Dorset<\/a>.\u00a0 The extensive coastline of Portland is prone to a range of complex landslide mechanisms.\u00a0 At present there is an interesting progressive failure developing on the Weare Cliffs section of the coastline.\u00a0 The Daily Echo has a nice article about it<\/a>, including these two images by Mark Godden<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"Portland\"<\/a>

Mark Godden via The Daily Echo<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

\"Portland\"<\/a>

Mark Godden via The Daily Echo<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

Geoff Kirby has a really nice webpage describing this area of Portland<\/a>, including details of the extensive quarrying that has occurred in this area.\u00a0 Many of the historic buildings in London (including Buckingham Place for example) are built from Portland limestone<\/a>, and of course this is also the area after which Portland cement<\/a> is named.\u00a0 The key to these landslides though is that the hard, strong Portland limestone overlies much weaker marls, clays and shales.\u00a0 It is deformation in these weaker lower beds that permits the development of the failures.<\/p>\n

\"Portland\"<\/a>

Google Earth<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

The images above suggest that the landslide has extended back through the area of the coastal path, which has already been rerouted.\u00a0 This landslide is likely to become quite interesting in the months ahead as we move into the wetter winter period.\u00a0 I have seen no suggestion to date that any infrastructure is threatened by this landslide on Portland though, so in many ways it is of academic interest.\u00a0 It would be fascinating to see a new aerial view of the landslide.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Dorset in southern England, a complex progressive landslide is developing on the Weare Cliffs on the Isle of Portland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":16027,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[458,469,959,948,547,133],"class_list":["post-16025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-report","tag-dorset","tag-featured","tag-landslide-report","tag-portland","tag-progressive-failure","tag-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16025","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=16025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16025\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}