{"id":5518,"date":"2012-11-23T15:39:56","date_gmt":"2012-11-23T15:39:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=5518"},"modified":"2012-11-23T15:40:21","modified_gmt":"2012-11-23T15:40:21","slug":"boulders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2012\/11\/23\/boulders\/","title":{"rendered":"Boulders!"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the last few days there have been several interesting incidents involving boulders on various scales:<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 A small boulder movement in Bath, England<\/strong><\/p>\n

The spell of exceptionally wet weather in the Uk over the last few months continued yesterday (and there is more due tomorrow) with a very intense low pressure system bringing very heavy precipitation.\u00a0 In the beautiful city of Bath, a boulder was dislodged and rolled about 20 m downhill<\/a> overnight.\u00a0 This was quite small, but still had an estimated mass of about 3 tonnes:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

http:\/\/www.itv.com\/news\/west\/update\/2012-11-23\/landslip-in-bath-releases-huge-boulder\/<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

The boulder has a rather strange shape, so I’d be interested to hear what it is made from.<\/p>\n

On a slightly larger scale, James Glover, a PhD student here at Durham<\/a>, drew two really ice examples from Europe last week to my attention:<\/p>\n

2. A large boulder fall in Switzerland<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Switzerland last week an 80 cubic metre boulder fell onto Julierstrasse between Rona and Mulegns.\u00a0 James passed on to photos that Maja Bless took of the boulder and its source \/ track:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

. \"\"<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3. A very large boulder fall on the Gotthard Tunnel rail line.<\/strong><\/p>\n

(And many thanks to a few other people for highlighting this one too).<\/em>\u00a0 Last Wednesday a huge boulder fell onto the Gotthard Tunnel railway line in Switzerland.\u00a0 This Swiss article<\/a> provides the details in German, but in a nutshell about 70 cubic metres of rock came down and landed on the track, which was blocked until last Monday.\u00a0 This is a screen grab from that article – I suspect that the designers of the rock catch fence didn’t quite anticipate that their design would be tested to this extent:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

This site has suffered repeatedly from landslides this year, but it may well have been that the geologists found it very difficult to assess the stability of a block this large.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three examples of boulders on the move in the last ten days or so, one from the UK and two from Switzerland <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":5524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[116,469,56,444,133],"class_list":["post-5518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boulder","tag-featured","tag-rockfall","tag-switzerland","tag-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5518","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=5518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}