Landslide case studies from the Xian Center of Geological Survey, China

The Xian Center of Geological Survey is compiling a set of very useful web resources of case studies of large landslides in Central China. This is particularly interesting as many of the slides are loess failures, which are comparatively poorly documented. The home page is here:

http://www.xian.cgs.gov.cn/english/achievements/land/

There are two items of particular interest there. The first is a PDF of a presentation on the landslides triggered by the Wenchuan earthquake. This contains some great images of the slides - I include this image from the presentation as a taster:

The second comes in the form of two PDFs of a book entitled "Landslides in China - Selected Case Studies by Yin Yueping. This is a very impressive book, again with a selection of wonderful images.

An interesting landslide website: Observatoire Multidisciplinaire des Instabilités de Versants' (OMIV)

In France there is an organisation called OMIV (Observatoire Multidisciplinaire des Instabilités de Versants), which is charged with the responsibility to "conduct geomorphologic, geologic, hydrologic, geophysical and seismic studies related to long-term monitoring, understanding of processes, and assessment of hazards at several active landslides". Perhaps most interestingly, they make the data from their various measurements available online, which provides a great research and teaching tool. The website is here:

http://eost.u-strasbg.fr/omiv/Accueil.html

The key aspect of the site is detailed four case studies of landslides in France. In each case detailed information is provided on each landslide, together with a quite detailed explanation of the slide. One example is the La Valette mudslide, which is this one (Google Earth image):


For each of the landslides it is possible to download an array of information, including maps, seismic datasets, movement data, meteorological data, groundwater data, etc. It is quite a resource, and its all available free of charge.

British Geological Survey landslide web page

The British Geological Survey (BGS) appear to have been quite active of late in overhauling their web pages, reflecting what seems to be an improved ethos of delivery of information to end users. The landslide pages seem to have been subjected to this upgrade of late, which has led to the creation of a really good set of case study pages, backed up with photos, reports and maps. These pages are available below - they are a little slow on my system, but that might be my wireless router:

http://www.bgs.ac.uk/science/landUseAndDevelopment/landslides/caseStudies.html

A good example of this resource is the 1993 Holbeck Hall landslide (see BGS page here), which includes this image:


Perhaps most excitingly, parts of the UK national landslide database are going to be made available online for free through the new Geoindex tool. A Beta version of this tool is already available - it looks to be a really exciting tool.

Great stuff!

A useful tailings dam failure resource

Image of the Merriespruit Tailings Dam failure in South Africa (image from Tailings.org)

In the last year I have twice posted extensively about particular tailings dams failures and the resulting flowslides. The events in question were the 8th September 2008 Taoshi failure in Shaanxi, China and the 22nd December 2008 Tennessee Valley Authority failure in at the Kingston fossil plant in Harriman, Tennessee, USA.

The WISE Uranium project has some very interesting pages here on the safety of tailings dams. I would like to bring to your attention two particularly useful elements of this:

1. The site contains a novel narrated presentation on tailings dam stability.
2. Perhaps most usefully, the site also contains a chronology of major tailings dam failures from 1961 to the present.

The latter notes that it is not complete due to lack of data, but most of the largest events are probably recorded. It is depressing to note that the trend in occurrence through time has remained remarkably constant (see Fig. 1 below), suggesting that there is still much to do to reduce the occurrence of this type of disaster.

Fig. 1: Trend in recorded instances of tailings dam failures as recorded on the WISE Uranium project website.

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: