[ad_1]
The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
On 8 December 2024, a very large landslide occurred at Arhavi in the Artvin area of Turkey, killing four people in a car that was travelling along the coastal highway.
Tolga Gorum has a good post on Twitter that provides some detail:-
The automatic translation of his text is as follows:-
Could the Arhavi (Artvin) landslide that occurred in the early hours of today (December 08, 2024) have been foreseen? It was definitely foreseeable by this landslide expert. Although it is difficult to estimate the time, this landslide has actually given signals since 2020 that I am here and I have all the indicators to occur. Landslides can be predicted spatially and even temporally. Existing landslides before this event have carried the prediction of this landslide into the future. Unfortunately, the previous landslides mentioned here do not even exist in current inventories. Realizing the current dangers before they cause more devastating results can only be achieved by presenting this scientific information.
Cumhuriyet has a nice drone video of the aftermath of the landslide on Youtube:-
The location of the landslide appears to be [41.3377, 41.2635]. This is a Google Earth image of the site from May 2020:-
Tolga’s point is that there were clear signs of instability on this slope prior to failure – and I agree. The drone footage shows that the landslide crown took a section of the road at the crest of the slope:-
The Google Earth imagery from May 2020 clearly shows a large tension crack crossing this small road at exactly this point:-
It would be interesting to see InSAR imagery of this site, but there were clear indications of the potential for a large-scale failure more than four years before the tragedy occurred.
There are two obvious questions to ask about this site.
First, do the roads at the foot of the slope indicate that quarrying had occurred, potentially leaving the slope in an unstable condition?
And second, why was no action taken when there were such obvious signs of instability for years prior to the failure?
Text © 2023. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.
Related
[ad_2]
