{"id":16760,"date":"2015-11-09T08:29:35","date_gmt":"2015-11-09T08:29:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=16760"},"modified":"2015-11-09T08:29:35","modified_gmt":"2015-11-09T08:29:35","slug":"tonzang-landslide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2015\/11\/09\/tonzang-landslide\/","title":{"rendered":"Big news on the Tonzang landslide in Burma – probably the largest non-seismic landslide for a decade?"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Tonzang landslide in Burma<\/h5>\n

On 29th October I posted about the Tonzang landslide cluster in Burma<\/a>, which was triggered by exceptional rainfall at the end of July \/ early part of August this year.\u00a0 There seems to have been at least three exceptional landslides, of which the largest, which I am calling the Tonzang landslide, is very large indeed.\u00a0 This is a NASA satellite image, compiled by Colin Stark<\/a>, of the landslide:<\/p>\n

\"Tonzang

s<\/a> The Tonzang landslide, from the NASA EO-1 image. Courtesy of NASA and Colin Stark<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

This landslide is 5.9 km from crown to the toe of the deposit.\u00a0 Colin and Goran Ekstrom<\/a> have gone back to the seismic data and have now found the signal that this landslide generated, which they have then inverted to generate the statistics (see my post about their paper in Science on this for further details<\/a>).\u00a0 And the results are amazing – the data indicate that the landslide had a mass of 395 million tonnes, which, assuming a density of 2.5 tonnes per cubic metre, yields a volume of about 160 million cubic metres.\u00a0 I believe that this is the largest non-seismic landslide since the 2004 Mount Bawakaraeng landslide in Indonesia (can anyone think of a larger non-seismic landslide in the interim?).\u00a0 By contrast the enormous Bingham Canyon landslide was 65-70 million cubic metres<\/a>, less than half as large, for example.<\/p>\n

Other statistics from the inversion, courtesy of Colin and Goran:<\/p>\n