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Landslides – Get the Facts
The Earth’s land moves at least a few centimetres a year. But there are times when it can move metres, even kilometres at a time. This is when there is a landslide, avalanches or mudslide.
Landslides vary in size
Landslides can vary in size. They can be as small as the movement of a single boulder in a minor rock fall or as big as thousands of tonnes of earth and debris that fall to the bottom of a slope or a cliff.
How a landslide occurs
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Landslides occur when tension cracks in
the ground appear and begin to cause a scarp.
(see text on the left for more information)
As the land slowly moves, by a few millimetres (mm) a day, it causes tension cracks in the earth and in the bedrock. As this tension increases and significant changes in moisture occur, from things like heavy rainfall or the fast melting of snow, the land begins to move more and more.
The image on the right shows how this movement in the land can cause a landslide.
Effects of landslides
Landslides can happen in different places and have different effects on people, buildings and animals.
Landslides can occur in different places and have different effects on the landscape. Landslides that occur on the edge of a cliff will affect and endanger homes and lives. The debris which will be made up the sediments, possibly parts of or the whole home, will be deposited on the land below, which again, could endanger more lives, animal and other structures.
Did you know?
- Landslides are quick. In Canada, one landslide caused a riverbank to move 680 meters in less than an hour.
- In Australia, the worst recorded landslide was in Tasmania, when 35 houses were destroyed in two adjacent landslides in the 1960s.
- Melting ice in the northern hemisphere can cause ice dams that block rivers and force water to burst through shorelines. When the pressure of the water is too strong, sudden outburst floods surge downstream with blocks of ice 5 or 7 meters tall.
- In America, between 25 and 50 people are killed in landslides each year.
- The May 1980 eruption of the Mount St. Helens volcano caused the largest landslide in history – a rock slide-debris avalanche large enough to fill 250 million dump trucks.