Sichuan Earthquake Update
Failures
Judge Rules City of San Diego Not Responsible for Mt. Soledad Landslide in 2007
The Mt. Soledad Landslide in a La Jolla California neighborhood destroyed 3 houses and damaged others and it also shut down Mt. Soledad Road for an entire year after it occurred in October of 2007. Residents blamed the city of San Diego, and 65 homeowners filed suit, claiming that leaking pipes caused the landslide and the City should cover damages.
Last week, a superior court judge ruled in favor of the City of San Diego. So far I have not seen anything indicating if the residents plan to appeal the ruling.
One interesting note regarding the trial, the City released an 8-minute cell phone video taken by a geotechnical engineer or drilling contractor employed by the City that showed the road cracking and buckling just prior to failure. The homeowners used the video to try to make their own case. Click through for a portion of the video and a link to the full one.
Geologic Hazards
NASA Building Crowd-sourced Landslide Inventory
NASA scientists are building an open global inventory of landslides with the goal of improving predictive models for landslides. The data is crowd-sourced and some are scraped from news sources as well. Anyone can download […]
Geoarchaeology
Tectonics and Ancient Civilizations
A new study published in the current issue of Geoarchaeology claims that earthquake-prone areas along the edges of tectonic plates were far more likely to give birth to great ancient civilizations than less dynamic landscapes. The author of the paper, Eric Force, a (U of A Wildcat!) says that 13 of 15 ancient civilizations sites aren’t the product of chance. Instead, ancient people appear to have chosen to settle close to a tectonic plate boundary. The exceptions were in ancient China and Egypt. [Image Adapted from Eric R. Force, Geoarchaeology: An International Journal, 23 (2008)]