The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
At 11:50 am on Saturday 8 February 2025, the Jinping landslide struck in Junlian County in the Yibin administrative area of Sichuan Province in China. Triggered by heavy rainfall, the landslide is known to have killed one person, whilst 28 are missing and two individuals were injured. There is no practical possibility of further survivors.
I have tracked down the location of the failure to [27.99927, 104.60863]. This is an image of the aftermath of the landslide, posted by Xinhua:-
ShanghaiEye has also posted some drone footage of the landslide, including the source area:-
The failure appears to be have occurred on an extremely steep slope in sedimentary rock. This initial collapse has transitioned into a rock and debris avalanche, Xinhua estimates the volume to be >100,000 cubic metres with a runout distance of 1.2 kilometres. The first image shows some super-elevation as the landslide went around the initial bend in the channel, which suggests a high velocity.
Google Earth has a good archive of images of the site. This was the location in May 2010 – the marker is on the site of the landslide scar:-
However, an image from 2014 (unfortunately with some distortion) shows a dramatic change:-
A significant failure had occurred – note the loss of trees and the debris at the foot of the main slope, some of which was extremely close to the houses in this area.
It appears that failures on this slope continued to occur in the subsequent years. This image is from June 2019, showing that more debris had accumulated:-
The focus at the moment is on the search operation, and as usual Xinhua is posting a deluge of heroic images of rescuers in uniform scouring the site for survivors.
However, in the longer term the key question will be whether this might have been anticipated – as noted above, the archive images suggest that this site had a history of multiple failures. More recent satellite imagery tells an interesting story. I will return to that theme in my next post.