{"id":17696,"date":"2016-02-04T08:58:06","date_gmt":"2016-02-04T08:58:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=17696"},"modified":"2016-02-04T08:58:06","modified_gmt":"2016-02-04T08:58:06","slug":"muzaffarabad-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2016\/02\/04\/muzaffarabad-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Landslides near Muzaffarabad from the 2005 Kashmir earthquake"},"content":{"rendered":"
Landslides near Muzaffarabad from the 2005 Kashmir earthquake<\/h5>\n

The M=7.6 2005 Kashmir earthquake <\/a>in northern Pakistan is thought to have killed over 80,000 people (and most likely over 100,000), and left 3.5 million people homeless.\u00a0 A key factor in the impact of this earthquake was the devastating effect of many thousands of landslides.\u00a0 One of the most seriously affected areas was Muzaffarabad – the city itself was very seriously damaged by the shaking, and there was also a huge impact of landslides in the local area.\u00a0 Google Earth now has very high quality imagery of the area before and after the earthquake, and a further set collected more recently (in 2014), almost a decade after the event.\u00a0 This is an image of one of the most seriously affected areas before the earthquake, taken in 2002:<\/p>\n

\"Muzaffarabad\"

Google Earth imagery of the Muzaffarabad area in 2002, before the 2005 earthquake<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

The river that runs north – south across the image is the Neelum.\u00a0 On the southern edge of the image the main part of the city of Muzaffarabad is clearly visible.\u00a0 There are landslides in the image, most notably along the Neelum and on the walls of some of the smaller channels.\u00a0 Contrast this with an image of the area after the October 2005 earthquake – this image was collected on 31st June 2006.\u00a0 Note that the green area on the right is the pre-earthquake image:-<\/p>\n

\"Muzaffarabad\"

Google Earth imagery from 2006 showing the dramatic increase in the amount of landslides triggered by the 2005 earthquake<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

The most dramatic area of landsliding is the huge cliff collapse events that occurred on the east bank of the river to the north of the city (and note how much the city had expended in the few years prior to the earthquake), but there is also dramatic landsliding along the Neelum river, to the east of Muzaffarabad and along the river to the northwest.\u00a0 I took photographs of some of the landslides at the time.\u00a0 This is the area of massive rock cliff collapse to the east of the city:-<\/p>\n

\"Muzaffarabad\"

Massive rockslope failure to the east of Muzaffarabad<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

Whilst this some of the landslides on the Neelum River.\u00a0 This area was extremely badly affected my shallow rockslope failures:<\/p>\n

\"Muzaffarabad\"

Extensive shallow rockslides along the Neelum River<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

Landslides are one of the enduring legacies of an earthquake in a mountain chain.\u00a0 This Google Earth image was collected in April 2014.\u00a0 It is heartening to see reconstruction in the city, but note just how obvious the landslides are, and many are very obviously fresh failures.\u00a0 A decade on it is clear that earthquake induced landslide remain a major issue in the Muzaffarabad area:<\/p>\n

\"Muzaffarabad\"

Google Earth imagery of the Muzaffarabad area, collected in 2014<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 2005 Kashmir earthquake in Pakistan triggered large numbers of landslides. Google Earth imagery illustrates their dramatic impacts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":17706,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[537],"tags":[23,469,316,10,72],"class_list":["post-17696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-earthquake-induced-landslide","tag-earthquake","tag-featured","tag-google-earth","tag-pakistan","tag-south-asia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17696","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=17696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}