{"id":6403,"date":"2013-05-12T00:06:56","date_gmt":"2013-05-12T00:06:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=6403"},"modified":"2013-05-12T00:06:57","modified_gmt":"2013-05-12T00:06:57","slug":"the-wenchuan-earthquake-five-years-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2013\/05\/12\/the-wenchuan-earthquake-five-years-on\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wenchuan earthquake, five years on"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Five years ago today, on 12th May 2008, Sichuan Province was struck by the devastating M=7.9 Wenchuan earthquake.\u00a0 This earthquake was the landslide event of a generation, with over 60,000 slides being triggered, causing over 20,000 of the 80,000 fatalities.\u00a0 In the aftermath of the earthquake the army fought a desperate battle to drain the barrier lake at Tangjiashan, which threatened a million people.<\/p>\n

Today I am in Chengdu attending a conference to mark the anniversary of the earthquake.\u00a0 The meeting, organised by the Chengdu University of Technology, aims to share information about earthquake-induced landslides.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the Chair of the conference, Professor Runqiu Huang, has written a really nice article in the current edition of Nature Geoscience<\/a> (Huang and Fan 2013) about the landslides triggered by the earthquake.\u00a0 Unfortunately it is behind a paywall. \u00a0 Part of the paper reflects upon the unexpected or unanticipated dimensions of the landslide problem.\u00a0 Three key themes emerge:<\/p>\n