The ongoing landslide at St Lawrence on the Isle of Wight. – GWC Mag

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.

The extraordinary spell of wet weather continues to have a major impact across the United Kingdom, with landslides occurring in many places. The rail network is being significantly disrupted by earthworks failures, for example.

On the Isle of Wight, a number of landslides have developed over the winter, with the latest being the large failure at St Lawrence to the west of Ventnor in the Undercliff. Over the last two days, a couple of additional pieces of information have emerged that helps to understand the landslide. A community website, the Island Echo, has published a set of drone images of damage caused by the landslide, of which this photograph is one:-

Note the large tension cracks across the gardens of the houses – close inspection of the images shows that this damage extends to the upslope side of the houses. Another drone image, looking directly onto the landslide, shows the tension cracks, but also picks up serious damage to a property downslope:-

The damage to this lower house (which I believe is located at [50.5826, -1.2572], and the land around it, is highlighted in a video that has been posted to Youtube by Allen Wood:-

The damage to this property is severe already – the news report indicates it is a total loss – and there is a huge amount of ground deformation too:-

As I noted above, the key driver has been exceptional rainfall for the United Kingdom over a prolonged period. Dave Throup has a really interesting pair of tweets that illustrate this point:-