Riverbank collapses on the Murray River in Australia

As I am currently in Sydney en route to New Zealand it seemed appropriate to post an Australian story. Australia rarely appears on the fatal landslide database, but it currently has a profound slope failure issue of its own, which is sufficiently serious to merit a campaign by a newspaper.

The issue is related to the Murray River in the southeast of the country:

The problem is that the Murray River is currently suffering river bank collapses along a 270 km stretch. The land adjacent to the banks is cracking, some collapses have already occurred, and the situation is getting progressively worse.

Image of an ongoing riverbank failure on the Murray (from here)

The problem is being blamed on the current drought in south Australia. As a result the flow level in the Murray River is at historically low levels. It is not immediately clear to me whether this means that the riverbanks have been debutressed by the reduced flow, or are cracking due to being exceptionally dry, or have lost the stabilising affect of vegetation due to the drought, or a combination of all three (or even some other factor), but the situation is clearly critical.

River bank erosion in Taiwan during Typhoon Sinlaku

Over the weekend Typhoon Sinlaku slowly tracked across the northern part of Taiwan (Fig. 1). Whilst attention was diverted towards the landfall of Hurricane Ike in Texas, this typhoon wreaked considerable havoc across Taiwan. The steep, weak mountains of Taiwan are amongst the most landslide prone environments on Earth. Typhoons in Taiwan deposit extraordinary amounts of rain. Typhoon Sinlaku was no exception - parts of Taichung County in central Taiwan recorded over 1600 mm of rainfall during the passage of the Typhoon - that is about double the annual rainfall of Durham.

Fig. 1: The passage of Typhoon Sinlaku (image from Tropical Storms Worldwide).

Unsurprisingly the typhoon has triggered extensive landslides; at the time of writing at least four landslide related fatalities have been recorded, and there is the possibility of more victims in a landslide event that buried a tunnel in the Central Mountains. Probably the most spectacular slope related event has however occurred as a result of extensive river bank erosion in the hot springs resort of Lushan in Nantou County (Fig. 2). In particular, the Kimei Hot Springs Hotel has had rather an unfortunate time.

Fig. 2: Google Earth image of Lushan

Before (Expedia):

After (Taipei Times):