The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
Over a long period of time, I collected data on landslides that kill people around the world – work that started on a whim but became very interesting. My two most cited papers are on this topic.
Due to the pressures of my leadership career, I stopped this data collection in 2016, although I have no restarted and am collecting data for 2024 that is already proving to be interesting. But work continues on our original dataset, especially in combination with other open access sources of data.
We have just published the latest version of these analyses in the journal Natural Hazards (Fidan et al. 2024), work that has been led by Seçkin Fidan from Ankara University in Turkey. This uses the data that was described in Froude and Petley (2018), which is the global dataset for the period from 2004 to 2016 inclusive. The interesting aspect of this new piece of work is that it looks patterns of fatal landslides against other potential factors, such as climate, population density and per capita GDP. The paper is open access, so you can take a look for yourself.
In line with my work with Melanie Froude (Froude and Petley 2018), one aspect of this study is to compare landslides that were triggered by “natural” processes (i.e. rainfall) from those triggered by human activities (mining, road construction and suchlike). In both cases most fatal landslides occur in the mountains of areas that are either tropical or temperate in terms of climate. The map in this diagram from the paper, which plots landslide density for the parts of the world most affected by such events:-
The map identifies the major hotspot areas, most notably the Himalaya range, but a number of other regions as well.
But most interestingly, natural and anthropogenic landslides have quite different characteristics. So, for example, fatal landslides triggered by natural variables generally tend to occur in the highest portions of the topographic profile (i.e. at higher elevations in the mountain chain), where there is less human disturbance. Local slope gradients tend to be steep.
On the other hand, anthropogenic fatal landslides cluster at much lower elevation on slopes in which the local gradients are less steep, but human intervention is higher.
There is much more work to do on these datasets, especially in light of continued changes to climate, the land surface and the population on a global and regional scale. I’m hoping to be able to post about fatal landslides in the the early part of 2024 in the near future.
References
Froude M.J. and Petley D.N. 2018. Global fatal landslide occurrence from 2004 to 2016. Natural Hazards and Earth System Science 18, 2161-2181. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-2161-2018
Fidan, S., Tanyaş, H., Akbaş, A. et al. 2024. Understanding fatal landslides at global scales: a summary of topographic, climatic, and anthropogenic perspectives. Natural Hazards (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-024-06487-3
