This blog provides a commentary on landslide events occurring worldwide, including the landslides themselves, latest research, and conferences and meetings. The blog is written on a personal basis by Dave Petley, who is the Wilson Professor of Hazard and Risk in the Department of Geography at Durham University in the United Kingdom.

This blog is a personal project that does not seek to represent Durham University.

Sunday, 25 April 2010

The location of the Taiwan highway landslide

I have I think identified the location of the Taiwan highway landslide today.  Based upon this image (source):

The location appears to be here:


It appears that the failure has occurred on the cutslope shown in the centre of the image, with the margin of the slide being close to the bridge (which can be seen in the first image on top of the debris).  Thus, it appears to be a large cut slope failure.

This is certainly not the first time a cut slope has failed on a major highway, as these two examples show.  First, the Pigeon Gorge slide in North Carolina last year:


And second the 2003 Bukit Lanjan landslide in Malaysia:


However this slide in Taiwan is unusually large, with an interesting mechanism.

2 comments:

Rachel said...

Hi, I came across your blog looking for inspiration on how to improve my presentation for the EGU next week and just wanted to say that your presentations look good and that your blog is very interesting and has inspired me to start something similar. I will bookmark this and continue to read with interest.

Anonymous said...

Yes, you are correct on the location. I live 1 km from this landslide and can confirm that the satalite image is ,again, correct.