{"id":2931,"date":"2011-04-19T07:16:37","date_gmt":"2011-04-19T07:16:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=2931"},"modified":"2011-04-19T07:16:37","modified_gmt":"2011-04-19T07:16:37","slug":"rockfalls-and-landslides-from-the-february-2011-earthquake-in-christchurch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2011\/04\/19\/rockfalls-and-landslides-from-the-february-2011-earthquake-in-christchurch\/","title":{"rendered":"Rockfalls and landslides from the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 22nd February earthquake in Christchurch triggered extensive landslides and rockfalls<\/a> in the Port Hills area to the east of the city. \u00a0 These mass movements resulted in at least five fatalities, and many homes were damaged.\u00a0 Unfortunately, these mass movements represent a serious long term threat in many areas – in the aftermath of the earthquake several hundred houses had to be evacuated.\u00a0 The science response to the landslide problem was led by GNS Science<\/a> under the Geonet programme<\/a>, assisted by partners from the public and private sectors.\u00a0 They have produced an excellent poster describing these activities that is available for download here<\/a>.\u00a0 The file size is about 1.7 MB.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most interesting data on the poster is a map of the distribution of the different mass movement types:<\/p>\n

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For reference the image below shows the same area from Google Earth:<\/p>\n

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The Google Earth image helps to show the way that the mass movements are concentrated on the steepest slopes, especially the active and abandoned coastal cliffs.\u00a0 There is a very helpful report written by Graham Hancox of GNS<\/a> describing the helicopter reconnaissance flight that they undertook in the aftermath of the earthquake.\u00a0 Note this is a pdf file, though does not appear to be labeled as such.\u00a0 Firefox couldn’t download it, but Internet Explore had no problems).\u00a0 There are some stunning aerial shots in there, of which I reproduce just two here:<\/p>\n

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These are remarkable images, which are being backed up with a very comprehensive data collection and hazard analysis exercise.\u00a0 The GNS blog<\/a> has a short but excellent post<\/a> outlining some of the work that is being undertaken to understand and mitigate the legacy rockfall hazard, in which with my former PhD student Chris Massey is playing a key role.\u00a0 We will all await the formal reports and scientific papers from this work with great interest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A stunning set of GNS images and information about the rockfalls and landslides caused by the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":2934,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,23,7],"class_list":["post-2931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christchurch","tag-earthquake","tag-new-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931","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=2931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}