{"id":27631,"date":"2018-05-02T07:15:54","date_gmt":"2018-05-02T07:15:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=27631"},"modified":"2018-05-02T16:21:23","modified_gmt":"2018-05-02T16:21:23","slug":"ultar-glacier-rock-and-ice-avalanche-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2018\/05\/02\/ultar-glacier-rock-and-ice-avalanche-1\/","title":{"rendered":"The 3 km long Ultar Glacier rock and ice avalanche &#8211; first satellite images"},"content":{"rendered":"<h4>The 3 km long Ultar Glacier rock and ice avalanche &#8211; first satellite images<\/h4>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2018\/04\/10\/karimabad-1\/\">Last month I highlighted the large Ultar Glacier rock and ice avalanche<\/a> that struck a valley close to the town of Karimabad in northern Pakistan.&nbsp; This event, which was caught on video, sadly killed three people who were trekking in the valley at the time.&nbsp; Frustratingly, until now cloud has prevented capture of decent images, but yesterday my friend Mikhail Dokukin pointed out to me that imagery is now available.&nbsp; He very kindly put together this before and after GIF based upon Landsat and Sentinel data:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_27635\" style=\"width: 650px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-27635\" width=\"640\" height=\"829\" class=\" wp-image-27635\" alt=\"Ultar Glacier rock and ice avalanche\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/files\/2018\/05\/18_04-Ultar-rock-fall-1.gif\"\/><p id=\"caption-attachment-27635\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Before and after imagery of the Ultar Glacier rock and ice avalanche. Image from Landsat and sentinel data, compiled by Mikhail Dokukin.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>.<\/p>\n<p>That inspired me to take a look at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.planet.com\/\">Planet Labs<\/a> imagery for the area, and it turns out that there is a now a good before and after image pair available.&nbsp; This is an image taken on 5th April 2018:-<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_27643\" style=\"width: 650px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-27643\" width=\"640\" height=\"603\" class=\"size-full wp-image-27643\" alt=\"Ultar rock and ice avalanche\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/files\/2018\/05\/18_04-Ultar-rock-fall-2-e1525244244377.jpg\"\/><p id=\"caption-attachment-27643\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.planet.com\/\">Planet Labs image<\/a> of the site of the Ultar Glacier rock and ice avalanche. Images collected by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.planet.com\/\">Planet Labs<\/a> on 1st April 2018, used with permission.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>.<\/p>\n<p>And this is the same site, also captured by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.planet.com\/\">Planet Labs<\/a> on 30th April 2018, after the rock and ice avalanche:-<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_27638\" style=\"width: 650px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-27638\" width=\"640\" height=\"593\" class=\"size-full wp-image-27638\" alt=\"Ultar rock and ice avalanche\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/files\/2018\/05\/18_04-Ultar-rock-fall-3-e1525244386417.jpg\"\/><p id=\"caption-attachment-27638\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.planet.com\/\">Planet Labs image<\/a> of the site of the Ultar Glacier rock and ice avalanche. Images collected by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.planet.com\/\">Planet Labs<\/a> on 30th April 2018, used with permission.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>.<\/p>\n<p>From this image it appears that the Ultar Glacier rock and ice avalanche started with a significant rockslope failure at the very top of the glacier, in the very northeast corner of the image.&nbsp; This appears to have entrained debris as it traveled towards the west across the surface of the glacier.&nbsp; After the slide turned to the south it started to deposit a very volume of material.&nbsp; Mikhail has estimated that the travel distance was about 3 km, making it the largest landslide of the year to date.<\/p>\n<h4>Reference<\/h4>\n<p>Planet Team (2017). Planet Application Program Interface: In Space for Life on Earth. San Francisco, CA.&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/api.planet.com\/\">https:\/\/api.planet.com<\/a><\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Planet Labs have now captured high quality imagery of the 3 km long Ultar Glacier rock and ice avalanche, which killed three people in northern Pakistan last month<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on wp_trim_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on wp_trim_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":27635,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[7203],"tags":[14541,469,10,1205,13865,72],"class_list":["post-27631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-planet-labs","tag-avalanbche","tag-featured","tag-pakistan","tag-planet-labs","tag-rock-and-ice-avalanche","tag-south-asia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27631","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=27631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}