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The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
On 17 July 2024, the Wuyigou landslide occurred on the banks of the Three Gorges reservoir in China.
I posted about this landslide at the time, in part because it was caught on video from a number of perspectives:-
An initial analysis of the Wuyigou landslide (Ding et al. 2024) has now been published in the journal Landslides. The paper doesn’t provide a lat/long location for the landslide (I wish this was mandatory), but there is enough information to track it down to [31.065, 110.7490]. The image below shows the approximate location of the landslide crown, with the movement being towards the camera:-
Ding et al. (2024) report that the landslide was 280 m long, 150 m wide and 20 m deep, giving a volume of about 800,000 m3. It destroyed 1,200 m of roads and 40,000 m2 of citrus groves, but there were no human casualties.
Interestingly, no rainfall was recorded in the two days prior to the landslide, but Ding et al. (2024) note that 171.5 mm of rainfall fell in the seven days to 15 July 2024. This is the second highest seven day rainfall total since January 2018, suggesting that precipitation and elevated pore water pressures might have played a role in the triggering of the failure.
The landslide occurred in soil and regolith. The authors suggest that toe erosion may have played a role in the causation of the landslide, although this is not obvious from the Google Earth imagery. It is perhaps surprising that they do not consider in detail the role that a possible long term elevated groundwater level, driven by the flooding of the valley by the Three Gorges Reservoir, will have played. This would be interesting to explore in more detail.
Ding et al. (2024) highlight ongoing hazards in the vicinity of the landslide, including the potential from failures from the steep lateral scarps, remobilisation of the landslide debris and obstruction of the valley. It appears that mitigation of the hazards is needed, although it is not obvious from the satellite imagery of the site that this is occurring as yet.
As always, this first analysis of the Wuyigou landslide is very welcome, so thanks to the authors, who are from China Three Gorges University and Southwest Jiaotong University, for publishing this review.
Reference
Ding, Y., Xia, Z., Rao, Y. et al. 2024. Preliminary analysis of Wuyigou landslide on 17 July 2024 in Zigui County, Hubei Province, China. Landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-024-02395-6
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.
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