There are many things that can cause a landslide, from natural disasters and heavy rainfall to human activity causing material on a hillside to collapse. They also differ hugely in scale, but between 2004 and 2016; almost 56,000 people died worldwide in more than 4,800 separate landslide events. The devastation and disruption cause by these incidents, often in some of the poorest and most remote regions in the world, present a number of challenges for us as scientists and local agencies tasked with managing the response. As such, we need to do everything we can to improve the ways in which we forecast these events.
Dr Sarah Boulton
Associate Professor of Active and Neotectonics, EXCESS project Principal Investigator
Until relatively recently, scientists had thought that the rate of landsliding in a certain area is constant from year to year, and that landslides would occur in similar places in those landscapes. If this were the case, it would make the events far more predictable. We now appreciate that isn’t the case, so we need more a sophisticated means of forecasting landslides and through this project, we hope to develop that.
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