{"id":43292,"date":"2023-03-28T05:55:12","date_gmt":"2023-03-28T05:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=43292"},"modified":"2023-03-28T19:04:16","modified_gmt":"2023-03-28T19:04:16","slug":"alausi-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2023\/03\/28\/alausi-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Alaus\u00ed: a massive landslide in Ecuador"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alaus\u00ed: a massive landslide in Ecuador<\/strong><\/h4>\n

The 26 March 2023 landslide at Alaus\u00ed in Ecuador<\/a> has attracted considerable attention, having buried a neighbourhood of the town.\u00a0 At the time of writing the confirmed loss of life is seven people, with a further 23 having been injured.\u00a0 It is reported that 64 people are missing, although there will be considerable uncertainty in that number.\u00a0 Earlier reports of 16 fatalities are now thought to be incorrect.<\/a><\/p>\n

The best overall view of this very large landslide is a drone video collected by Edwin Salazar that has been widely tweeted<\/a>:-<\/p>\n

https:\/\/twitter.com\/canarvaezm\/status\/1640328603198971907<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

The drone successfully captures a very deep-seated, rotational landslide in comparatively homogenous, but clearly weak, rocks.\u00a0 I would suspect that these might be volcanic materials?<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, AP has a remarkable image of the toe of the landslide<\/a>, and the immense damage that it has caused to the town of Alaus\u00ed:-<\/p>\n

\"The

The toe of the very large 26 March 2023 landslide at Alaus\u00ed in Ecuador. Image by AP via Andina<\/a>.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

This is roughly the same perspective from Google Earth, giving an idea of what has been lost in this lower portion:-<\/p>\n

\"Google

Google Earth image of the site of the very large 26 March 2023 landslide at Alaus\u00ed in Ecuador.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

The location of the landslide is [-2.193, -78.843].\u00a0 This is the best image that I have found that shows the entire landslide:-<\/p>\n

\"The

The very large 26 March 2023 landslide at Alaus\u00ed in Ecuador. Image by REUTERS\/Karen Toro<\/a>.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

Reports indicate that the area has suffered heavy rainfall in recent days<\/a>, which is also hindering the rescue operations.\u00a0 The area has been on yellow alert for landslides since 15 March 2023.<\/p>\n

In terms of Alaus\u00ed itself, there are reports that cracks started to appear in the area of the landslide in December 2022, and that irrigation water had ceased to flow in the area.\u00a0 The reports also indicate that some monitoring was ongoing at the site.<\/p>\n

It is interesting to take a wider perspective on the area around Alaus\u00ed:-<\/p>\n

\"Google

Google Earth image of the landscape around Alaus\u00ed in Ecuador.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

This is a landscape dominated by landslides.\u00a0 On the left side of the image are multiple shallow failures on steep slopes, many of which are affecting the road.\u00a0 But on the steep slopes around Alaus\u00ed there are multiple arcuate scars that probably mark the source zones of previous landslides, many of which would have been much larger than the event on Sunday.\u00a0 The largest of these might lie in the upper portion of the in the centre of the image, where there is a very large, arcuate scar and, downslope to the right, the possible remains of a degraded landslide block.\u00a0 This is, of course, only a hypothesis – more detailed mapping would be needed to confirm the theory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The massive 26 March 2023 Alaus\u00ed landslide in Ecuador is reported to have killed seven people and to have left a further 64 people missing. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":43294,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[30738,464,469,959,122],"class_list":["post-43292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-report","tag-ecuadir","tag-ecuador","tag-featured","tag-landslide-report","tag-south-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43292","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=43292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}