{"id":33181,"date":"2020-02-28T08:27:12","date_gmt":"2020-02-28T08:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=33181"},"modified":"2020-02-28T08:27:49","modified_gmt":"2020-02-28T08:27:49","slug":"salkantay-landslide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2020\/02\/28\/salkantay-landslide\/","title":{"rendered":"More information about the Salkantay landslide and mudflow"},"content":{"rendered":"

More information about the Salkantay landslide and mudflow<\/h4>\n

Over the last 24 hours more information has become available about the Salkantay landslide and mudflow<\/a>. Oscar Vilca has kindly contacted me to say that the event occurred on 23 February 2020, and not 24 February as had been widely reported.\u00a0 I will correct my original post.<\/p>\n

The triggering event is being described as an ice \/ rock avalanche with an initial volume of 400,000 cubic metres. This has clearly bulked up to form a mudflow with a much higher volume, presumably through entrainment of ice and saturated debris in the channel.\u00a0 This is similar to the Seti River rock avalanche and debris in Nepal in 2014<\/a>, which also had devastating effects.\u00a0 On this occasion the initial collapse may have been smaller, but the mudflow was on a similar scale.<\/p>\n

On Twitter, Julio Montenegro G. has posted an interpretation of the event<\/a>, based upon an image of the scar, which has then been located on pre-event imagery:-<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Salkantay

An interpretation of the Salkantay landslide and mudflow posted to Twitter by Julio Montenegro<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

I am not sure as to the origin of the image that shows the scar of the initial failure, but a better version was posted to Twitter by Turismo Peru<\/a>:-<\/p>\n

\"Salkantay

The scar of the Salkantay landslide, posted to Twitter by Turismo Peru<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

If this is indeed the scar then my interpretation is that this is a classic wedge failure in the rock mass, with a near vertical fall onto the ice and moraine at the toe of the slope. The rock slope would have been a mixture of rock and ice, both on the surface and within fractures.\u00a0 On impact the mass has probably fragmented to form an ice \/ rock avalanche, which has then entrained debris and ice \/ snow \/ water, transitioning to become the mudflow seen in the videos.\u00a0 This has behaved in a manner that is akin to a lahar<\/a>, with a large volume, high velocity and long runout.<\/p>\n

Reports suggest that <\/a>Salkantay Cocha lake remains intact<\/a>, but that waves within the lake, generated by the landslide, have caused some erosion of the moraine dam.\u00a0 This now needs to be monitored.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are of course some real human tragedies in this disaster<\/a>.\u00a0 The estimated human cost appears to be 13 people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Salkantay landslide was a wedge failure in the near-vertical rock mass. The mass fragmented on impact to form a rock\/ice avalanche that transitioned to a mudflow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":33186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[469,641,158,13865,122],"class_list":["post-33181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-report","tag-featured","tag-mudflow","tag-peru","tag-rock-and-ice-avalanche","tag-south-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33181","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=33181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}