daveslandslideblog is two years old today!

Very kindly AGU decided to hold a birthday lunch to celebrate the second anniversary of daveslandslideblog (actually the geobloggers lunch, but who's counting?). I started the blog two years ago as a bit of an experiment to see what would happen, and have really enjoyed putting it together (and I have learnt a huge amount too). During this time I have made 437 posts. I put a web counter on the site in early April 2008, since when the site has had >236,000 page requests from >125,000 visitors. In 2009 to date there have been visitors from 177 distinct countries. Unfortunately, like almost all blog sites Blogspot/Blogger is currently blocked in China, which is the world's most landslide-prone country. This is a real regret, and may mean that I need to set up a satellite site on a dedicated website at some point.

The pattern of visitors through time is quite interesting too. I track this data on a daily basis (I am such a nerd!), and the long term graph looks like this (this is smoothed with a seven day filter):


The huge peak early on is the Wenchuan earthquake and then Tangjiashan. The subsequent peaks can all be traced to specific large landslide events that have attracted lots of page searches. The overall trend is strongly upwards through time, but is also very seasonal. The key factor appears to be university term/semester dates (especially in the US and Europe), with visitor numbers picking up when term/semester starts (see this autumn for example), and then declining towards the end of the semester/term. Finally, the recent drop off may look alarming, but is just part of the normal cycle - there were lots of landslides in the autumn this year, hence the big peak, which was inevitably followed by a decline, plus numbers have dropped off as the university semesters have finished.

So what is the future of the blog? For now I anticipate keeping it going, although at times it can be a struggle. I notice that the other landslide blog, the strangely-named Landslides under Microscope, appears to have ceased (last post in October), which is a shame. I don't anticipate any major changes (and I am continuing to resist putting adverts onto the site), not least due to time constraints, but we'll see. The most bizarre aspect of this has been the recognition over the last year that I am far better known for my blog than for my research - and I have really appreciated all of the positive comments that I have received from people I have met around the world.

Comments and feedback welcome - in particular, how can I make it better?

Presentation of lanslides caused by Tropical Cyclone Aila in Darjeeling

The Savethehills blog has an interesting presentation on their website focusing on the landslides caused by Tropical Cyclone Aila in Northern India in May this year. It can be accessed here:

http://savethehills.blogspot.com/2009/12/cyclone-aila-in-photographs.html

Updates on the Nile River (Naches) landslide

Clearly the Nile River (Naches) landslide has effectively dropped off the media radar now. However, there are some excellent ongoing posts on this slide on the Sliding Though blog, which the is the Washington State landslide blogsite. You can access these posts here:

http://slidingthought.wordpress.com/

Landslides from Cyclone Alia in Darjeeling

One of the most admirable landslide websites that I know is the Save the Hills blog, which is the mouthpiece of a community level group trying to raise awareness of the problems of landslides in Darjeeling in NE India. I have featured this site several times before.

As Cyclone Alia has closed in on the area over the last few days See below) they have been warning of the danger of landslides triggered by the rainfall that the cyclone would inevitably bring. The Cyclone passed across the area yesterday - and sure enough reports are now emerging of the landslides that the rainfall has triggered. At the time of writing Sify is reporting 22 killed in landslides, with 10 injured and another six people reported missing. Over 100 landslides have been reported. The Times of India reports that 245 mm of rainfall fell in a 24 hour period.

Meanwhile, in the last few days there are also reports of a large landslide in Sialum District in Morobe province of Papua New Guinea, which is reported to have killed 19 people (although the picture is still rather unclear), landslides in Bhutan with at least one fatality, mudslides in Uttar Pradesh in India that killed eight people, and landslides in Guangdong that have killed four. Finally, there are some very unclear reports about the magnitude of the impact of heavy rainfall in Afghanistan, with reports of about 95 people killed in landslides and floods.

Sadly, none of this is particularly unusual as we are seeing the impacts of the development of the summer monsoon across Asia.

Some interesting landslide sites

I thought that it was high time to post a summary of some interesting landslide sites:

Aowanda landslide
There is an interesting youtube video of a smallish progressive rockslide occurring at Aowanda in Taiwan here. It should also be visible below:



Not quite as dramatic as some others, but useful nonetheless.

Five disastrous landslides that changed the Canadian Landscape
There is quite a nice non-scientific piece here that describes in non-technical language five large and significant historic landslides in Canada over the last century or so. Good images!

Rockfall blog
There is an interesting new blog here that looks at measures that can be used to prevent rockfalls. Although it is in Italian, Google Language Tools do a pretty good job of translating the text. I guess one should be a little careful of the fact that it is promoting a company, but there is some nice stuff there.

The largest known landslide?
National Geographic has a nice story here that speculates that a large deposit on Mars might be the debris from a landslide that would have been the size of the United States. Working on Mars must be great because no-one can check your interpretation with field data.

Flashflood footage
It is a fine line between a debris-rich flash flood and a debris flow, so I thought that I would highlight this youtube video of a flash flood in Australia. The first minute isn't terribly exciting, but stick with it! It should be visible below:



Extraordinary video of the Baldwin Hills dam disaster
There is an excellent video of the collapse of the Baldwin Hills dam in 1963 on youtube here. This is a great illustration of the dangers associated with the formation and collapse of landslide dams. Again, it should be visible below:

Malaysia landslide - residents action group blog

I have only briefly touched upon the 6th December 2008 landslide at Bukit Antarabangsa in Kuala Lumpur, which has been a very high profile event in Malaysia. I don't intend to comment on any aspect of the landslide - GiB has covered it in his own style in the oddly-named Landslide under Microscope blog - see here, here and here. Interestingly though a new Blog has appeared called Save Bukit Antarabangsa, which is a "voice of residents and owners" - essentially an online newspaper for a residents action group.

There is also quite an interesting blog by a resident, Yen Hee, who is working to help the community to recover. The blog is here.

Dave's landslide blog - one year on

Yesterday we threw a small party to celebrate the first birthday of this Blog, which is today. As you can imagine, it was well-attended by A-list celebrities, some of whom have a surprising interest in landslides. Did you know for example that Britney Spears has a deep fascination with flow dynamics (although rumours that the lyrics of her song were originally "my debris flow is killing me" may well be exaggerated). Robbie Williams has gone one step further, having completed a PhD in low cost landslide mitigation in mountainous environments. News that his song "Angel" was actually written in appreciation of gabian wall design ("...and through it all, it offers me protection") should be treated with a pinch of salt. Reports that he is considering a reunion with Take That in order to record a cover version of Transmission Vamp's "Landslide of Love" are something that we can all get excited about.

On a more serious note, I started the blog as an experiment to see what would happen, primarily with the aim of trying to break the barriers between academics and the wider community. I think it has worked - certainly I have had a lot of fun doing it and I have learnt a surprising amount - although it has not all gone to plan. Unfortunately I didn't put a web counter on the page until April, so my data for views of the blog only runs from there. I guess it is probably true to say that the site didn't get a huge amount of traffic before that though. So here are the stats:

Number of posts since 16th December 2008: 173
Number of views since 18th April 2008: 63,228
Number of visitors since 18th April 2008: 32,980.

The graph of page downloads since 18th April is shown below (click on the graph for a better view). You will see that the number of visitors varies hugely according to whether there is a large, high profile landslide in the news.


The highlight remains the post of 12th May 2008, which I put up at 07:27 UT, 29 minutes after the Wenchuan Earthquake occurred. This post said "it is reasonable to assume that this earthquake will have triggered large numbers of landslides as this is a very landslide-prone area...if the initial reports on this earthquake are correct then its impact could be fearsome."

Sadly all too true, although I guess I hadn't really envisaged just how bad it would actually be.

Finally, thanks to everyone who has tipped me off about videos, images, news stories, etc. I couldn't do this without you.

Best wishes,

Dave

Another landslide blog

Interestingly, I today came across another landslide blog, also housed on blogger:

Landslides under the microscope

The Blog appears to have been active since September this year, although it is not clear who is maintaining it. Nonetheless, someone is putting a great deal of time into it and there is some good stuff on the site. It has quite a strong Asian focus - especially Japan - so I guess that it is being hosted by someone from there.

It is a very welcome addition and I hope that it thrives.