Landslides in art: Part 6 - this time a song!

Regular readers will have seen the occasional posts in which I feature the occurrence of landslides in art (previous examples here, here, here and here).  You may also remember that I featured a project by artist Kane Cunningham to turn a landslide / erosion threatened house at Knipe Point in Scarborough into a work of living art.

Well, singer-songwriter Anne-Marie Sanderson has written a song about the project / house, which you should be able to view below via Youtube:



Whilst there are lots of songs that use the term landslide figuratively, this is the first one that I have heard that is actually directly about a landslide.  I would be interested in any other examples anyone may have. 

Anne-Marie's website is here.  Don't blame me if the background gives you a migraine!

Free workshop on coastal erosion, 19th March 2010

We are running a free workshop on erosion on 19th March 2010 in North Yorkshire, UK. Details in the flyer below, together with contact details (click on the image for a better view in a new window).

Please do register to come along!

Coastal erosion as art

The Guardian has a slightly bizarre article today. It is entitled "The art of watching your house fall into the sea". It tells the story of artist Kane Cunningham, who has bought a bungalow on the cliff edge at Knipe Point near to Scarborough. This site has been featured here before as recent landsliding has threatened to destroy a number of houses. He says in the article:

"I'm going to turn the moment my studio collapses into an art work: I've set up cameras to film it, and I've commissioned music and poetry to celebrate it. Both our houses punch a hole in what we think of as the value of ­property, and remind us of our moral and ethical responsibility to nature... When my studio disappears, I'll have no sense of loss – that will be its beautiful final act. The sooner it goes, for me, the better."

He has a website about this here. Quite bizarre, but it could be very interesting to watch.

Cayton Bay / Knipe Point landslide - report on options

A year or so ago I posted on an ongoing landslide at Cayton Bay in North Yorkshire, just an hour or so down the road from my base Durham. This landslide, which is no commonly called the Knipe Point landslide, was threatening 50 or so houses (see image below) - in the end three were demolished, although the rest are still under threat from the slide. Since my post the BGS have created a nice summary website here, from which this picture is taken:

The local council, Scarborough Borough, managed to find from a range of sources about £300,000 to pay for an investigation of the site, which was undertaken by Halcrow. This investigation was completed this week and will be discussed by the Council in a few days time. The Council has put out a press release here, although the report is not available online. The key findings are as follows:

a. The landslide is a deep seated, ancient landslide system. consisting of:
1. A main deep seated failure for which ground movement is controlled by the residual strength of the clay and a deep confined natural groundwater table;
2. Shallow mudslides in the overlying glacial tills for which the ground movement is controlled by an upper natural groundwater table. This slide is highly sensitive to small changes in the groundwater conditions.

I find the above quite surprising as the failures affecting the houses do not move that often - so this apparent high level of sensitivity is a little odd. I will need to read the report (I will try to get a copy).

The press release then discusses stabilisation issues - which is I am sure what the householders are worried about. It briefly mentions the constraints (minimal impact on the environment as the landslide contains a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), but a 50 year design life).

Three key actions are recommended:

1. "Maintain and continue monitoring of the surface and subsurface ground movement, groundwater and weather station network."
2. "Liase with stakeholders to review the findings of the report and discuss the way forward for managing the cliff instability risk at the site in the short and long term."
3. "Review funding options for promotion of the preferred engineering stabilisation options, and prepare an application for funding under the relevant and most appropriate legislation."

The preferred stabilisation option is unfortunately large and complex:

• Installation of deep drainage to reduce and control groundwater levels in the deeper water table.
• Construction of bored piles at Knipe Point to isolate the lower Cayton Cliff landslide system from the land above the cliff top.

The press suggest that this would cost £12 million (some reports suggest £20 million!). I would think that finding this sum of money is going to be tricky given the limited number of houses involved, although maybe the threat to the main road will help here.

Cayton Bay Landslide

It is not often that I get to write about a landslide that is (practically) in my own backyard, but this is one of those rare occasions. In fact for the last fortnight or so this landslide has been generating quite a lot of local news - see for example a report in the Daily Telegraph.

The landslide in question is in Cayton Bay in North Yorkshire. Here, a set of cottages have been built close to the edge of a coastal cliff. Over this winter the cliff has suffered a set of landslides that have caused a series of reasonable large slips that have allowed the cliff to retreat.

This Google Earth image shows the situation quite well.

Google Earth image of the Cayton Bay site

The threatened cottages are in the north-west corner of the images. The landslide is the heavily wooded area between the cottages and the sea. Unfortunately as the image from the Daily Telegraph shows, since this image has been collected the cliff has retreated rapidly due to reactivation of the landslide - estimates are that the cliff top has moved back 7 m this winter - and now at least some of the houses are seriously threatened. Reports indicate that at least two have had to be demolished to date. Given that insurance rarely covers landslide hazards, this must be heart-breaking for the residents.

Inevitably, questions are being asked as to what is going on at this site. Inevitably there is a great deal of speculation, including suggestions that the site has been affected by the building of a new bypass or that the construction of extensions to the bungalows has triggered failure. In my experience such causes are unlikely. The cause is probably rather more local. It is clear that the the coastal slope here is clearly a part of a large, rotational landslide complex which has shown activity before. This complex has been documented and indeed mapped well-before the most recent failures - the BBC for example notes that observations of instability were made by highway engineers in the late 1960's. Importantly, in May 2004 Jon Carey, Paul Fish and Roger Moore from Halcrow gave a presentation at a meeting of the Yorkshire Geological Society entitled "LANDSLIDE GEOMORPHOLOGY OF CAYTON BAY, NORTH YORKSHIRE". The abstract of the paper says:
This paper describes the geomorphology of a large coastal landslide complex at Cayton Bay, North Yorkshire. The area inland of the landslide is occupied by a strategically important road and a number of properties, and knowledge of current landslide behaviour and possible future scenarios is therefore important for future planning and risk. Instability at the site is associated with a series of faults which bring argillaceous Upper Jurassic rocks to sea-level. These soft rocks are overlain by more resistant sandstones. The sequence is capped by a thick and variable series of glacial sediments, that comprise tills with inter-bedded sand and gravel lenses, deposited during the Dimlington Stadial of the Late Devensian. In connection with the development of a future coastal strategy for Cayton Bay, detailed geomorphological field mapping was conducted which identified two major landslide systems. These include a periodically active mudslide complex at Cayton Cliff, recognised by a series of shallow scarps and benches with occasional back-tilted blocks, and an area of dormant deep-seated landslides at Tenants’ Cliffs, that includes a series of graben and horst structures. The origins of the landslides are unclear, but probably involved a variety of processes that led to a reduction in material shear strength or increases in pore water pressures. The timing of original failure may relate to deglaciation following the Dimlington Stadial, or periods of wet climate in the Holocene. Since sea-levels were not higher than present in the Holocene along this stretch of the coast, coastal erosion is not thought to have been a factor. The causes of the contemporary instability are likely to be due to the combined effects of coastal erosion and of groundwater, both of which are predicted to increase in future years due to the impacts of climate change. The implications include increasing risks to coastal assets and a need to manage and mitigate such risks.

This team from Halcrow are pretty competent, so I would trust their interpretation. Their view that activity of the landslide is probably associated with high pore pressures is probably correct, and it is notable that the weather has been cool and wet for the last 18 months or so in this area. The key question that needs resolving is where the water is coming from - is it just that pore pressures are higher than usual (this is very possible) or could there be some other source, such as leaking pipes or changed drainage? If the cause is just naturally high ground water then the long term implications for the cottages is potentially serious. The site is very large, which means that the cost of stabilisation are very high. The land is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, which means that it is protected, and it is owned by the National Trust, who are keen to protect the environment.