The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides. In the last few days, two really interesting and useful updates have been published covering the 3-4 October 2023 GLOF in the Teesta Valley in India and the 26 August 2026 landslide […]
mountains
The “Eternity Glaciers” Are Almost Gone
The equatorial glaciers atop Puncak Jaya, Oceania’s tallest peak, have shrunk by about 95% since 2002, according to a new photogrammetry mapping effort.
Mongolian Mountains Rose When the Crust Bounced Back
A plate folded, the lithosphere sank, and up popped a mountain range.
Vegetation Moves Upslope Across the Himalayas
The vegetation line in places like Nepal and Bhutan is shifting upward by meters per year, with implications for how water moves through the planet’s “Third Pole.”
Tree Lines Are Migrating. Some Up, Some Down.
Between 2000 and 2020, 42% of tree lines around the world crept upward, largely because of climate change. But 25% moved downhill, seemingly because of factors such as land use changes and wildfires.
Wealth and land-cover change govern landslide fatalities on world’s mountains
A new paper Fidan et al. (2026) demonstrates that wealth and the rate of land-cover change play a key role in determining the occurrence of fatal landslides in mountain areas. These factors are statistically more significant that precipitation and topography. A fascinating new paper (Fidan et al. 2026 – this paper is both open access […]
Los glaciares se están calentando más lentamente de lo esperado, pero no por mucho tiempo
Un conjunto de datos sin precedentes ofrece información sobre el efecto de enfriamiento contraintuitivo de los glaciares a escala global.
Satellite Radar Advances Could Transform Global Snow Monitoring
The recent SnowEx campaign and the new NISAR satellite mission are lighting the way to high-resolution snowpack monitoring and improved decisionmaking in critical river basins around the world.
Glaciers Are Warming More Slowly Than Expected, but Not for Long
An unprecedented dataset offers insight into the counterintuitive cooling effect of glaciers on a global scale.
Safety Device Supplies Life-Saving Air in an Avalanche
An Alpine medical team buried 24 volunteers in a mountain pass. Their study confirmed the efficacy of the Safeback SBX, which uses snow’s natural porosity to supply air to buried avalanche victims.
