The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
I have been looking at my data for fatal landslides in 2024, a resumption of work that I have been doing for many years but that fell into abeyance for a while as I developed my leadership career.
As of today, I have recorded 82 landslides that have caused loss of life in 2024, with 583 deaths.
It is interesting to compare this with previous years. The graph below shows monthly totals for fatal landslides back through the dataset, which includes the years 2003 to 2019 – note that this is a longer dataset than was reported in Froude and Petley (2018), and 2024. Clearly month 1 in January, month 2 is February, etc.:-
The 2024 total for March is for the first 11 days of the month, so this total will rise substantially over the next two weeks.
The data show that 2024 has totals that are at, or near to, the top of the historic distribution. Indeed, the total at the end of February (65) was the highest total recorded over the entire study period. If there is another 12 landslides in March this year (over and above the current cumulative total of 82 fatal landslides), which seems likely, then it will set the record for March too. I should add that this year’s total does not include landslides triggered by the January 2024 earthquake in Japan, which triggered fatal failures. I will account for this separately in due course, if the data is available.
Another way to look at this data is by looking at pentads – five day blocks – and again plotting with time. The graph below shows this data for 2018, 2019 and 2024:-
The pentad graph also shows that 2024 is experiencing a high level of fatal landslides compared with most previous years. The next job is try to understand why – is this because of the current El Nino event, for example, which has changed rainfall patterns? Or is it just a random variation? Or perhaps it’s an anthropogenic effect?
To understand that, further analysis is going to be needed. Where have they occurred? What was the trigger?
Considerable interesting work to do!
Reference
Froude, M. and Petley, D.N. 2018. Global fatal landslide occurrence from 2004 to 2016. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 18, 2161-2181.
