{"id":4945,"date":"2012-07-12T06:19:35","date_gmt":"2012-07-12T06:19:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=4945"},"modified":"2012-07-12T06:19:36","modified_gmt":"2012-07-12T06:19:36","slug":"the-mount-lituya-landslide-in-alaska-an-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2012\/07\/12\/the-mount-lituya-landslide-in-alaska-an-update\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mount Lituya landslide in Alaska – an update"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may remember that about a month ago I posted a requested for help to identify a landslide that Colin Stark had identified from the global seismic dataset.\u00a0 A few days later Keith Delaney<\/a> and Steve Evans<\/a> from the University of Waterloo in Canada came forward having remarkably identified the landslide, which was clearly a very mobile rock avalanche, from a very cloudy NASA image collected a few days later:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A few days later Keith<\/a> produced a better image based upon Landsat 7 data.\u00a0 As discussed previously, this instrument has a technical fault that produces a distorted dataset.\u00a0 However, the image was sufficiently good to be able to estimate that the landslide had a runout distance of about 9 km and a surface area of about 9.3 square kilometres – i.e. this is a really big landslide:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Yesterday, National Parks Traveler in the US produced a report with images of the landslide<\/a> as collected by a local pilot, Drake Olsont.\u00a0 The dynamics of the landslide are similar is some ways to those of the Seti River landslide in Nepal about which I posted a couple of months ago<\/a>, with a large rockslope failure, a large fall height and then a long runout of the debris.\u00a0 The National Parks Traveler article<\/a> provides an image of the landslide source:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Note the scale – the scarp is 150 m wide.\u00a0 The total vertical extent from crown to toe is estimated to be about 2,200 metres, suggesting that the fall height was in the order of 2 km.\u00a0 The Drake Olson photos<\/a> suggests that the landslide ran out as a highly mobile flow across the glacier surface:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Note the area of deposited dust on the right side of the image (labelled in the article as “air blast” and the rather beautiful flow features on the landslide surface.\u00a0 Finally, as the satellite imagery suggested, this landslide ceased moving having run out about 9 km:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A really interesting issue now is how this will effect the dynamics of this glacier.\u00a0 The addition of a large volume of rock, which adds both weight and a mantle of dark material, may have some key implications for the way that the glacier moves.\u00a0 However, we will not know what will happen for many years, and data will be hard to obtain in such a remote location.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New images have emerged of the Mount Lituya landslide in Alaska last month. It was a very large, very long runout rock avalanche <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":4950,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,3],"tags":[340,469,306],"class_list":["post-4945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-images","category-landslide-report","tag-alaska","tag-featured","tag-rock-avalanche"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4945","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=4945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}