Two days into the AGU Fall meeting and I feel exhausted already!\u00a0 As usual it is a modern day equivalent of the biathlon, consisting of mad dashes between sessions (carefully arranged to be the maximum distance apart) followed by a need to concentrate intensely for something between 15 minutes and two hours.<\/p>\n
it is had to identify the highlights s there has been so much good stuff.\u00a0 I should wave the flag for my team first – in particular a paper by Nick Rosser (on which I was a minor co-author) on the long term monitoring that we have been undertaking on the cliffs of North Yorkshire.\u00a0 This is a ten year (and counting) project with an amazing dataset, beautifully presented by Nick.\u00a0 In the same session Colin stark presented his work on characterising giant landslides using the global earthquake network.\u00a0 This is research that never ceases to impress, and it is allowing an understanding of the magitude-frequency relationships of these big slides.\u00a0 The verdict – they occur far more often than we realised, and events that we would have mapped as a single landslide from the deposit are often a series of events in reality. Speaking of which, Runqiu Huang presented work from Chengdu University of Technology on the giant landslides from the Wenhuan earthquake, including the largest slide in the last three decades at Daguangbao (>1.2 cubic kilometres!).\u00a0 The most interesting aspect of this work was a new model for large seismically triggered landslides, which suggests that they tend to have a steeped rear scarp and a lower angled sliding surface at the toe, forming\u00a0 chair shape, when compared with hydrologically triggered slides.\u00a0 That is an interesting idea that deserves further attention.<\/p>\n