At least 43 people were killed in devastating landslides and debris flows in northern China. Planet Labs images provide an insight into this disaster.
It is extremely challenging to keep up with the landslides occurring around the world at the moment. There has been a lot of attention paid to the remarkable rock slope failure and tsunami in Alaska. I feel that others are better placed to write about that (although I will probably continue to highlight updates via my BlueSky account), but if you get a chance please take a look at the images on the Alaska News Source website.
There have also been a devastating set of debris flows in northern Pakistan and parts of India and Nepal. At this stage, it is a little unclear to me as to the full extent of these events (especially in Pakistan) – I am likely to return to this theme.
Often the best way to understand an event is to piece together the news reports with satellite images when they become available. And so, let’s take a look at reported “floods” or “flash floods” (actually landslides and channelised debris flows) that occurred in Yuzhong County in Gansu Province in China on 7 August 2025. The BBC has a good report of the aftermath, whilst Al Jazeera reports 10 dead and 33 missing from this event. We must take reports of losses in China with a large pinch of salt.
The location of the source of this event is [35.71498, 104.02436]. So here is a Planet Labs image, dated 30 July 2025, showing the area affected. The marker is at the location highlighted above:-
And here is the same location after the event:-
And here is a slider to allow you to compare the images:-
This is a closer look at this area of intense landslides:-
What we see here is literally hundreds of shallow failures that will have occurred almost simultaneously, and then combined to form devastating channelised debris flows. There are many failures on the slopes to the southwest, but the greatest concentration is to the northwest is an area that is densely vegetated.
This is indicative of extremely high rainfall intensities, but this storm was highly localised. The area of intense landslides is only about 9 km x 5 km.
The downstream impacts were terrible. These are the settlements immediately to the east of the landslides:-
And here is the same area after the landslides:-
And again, here is a slider to allow the images to be compared:-
There is a large number of destroyed buildings in this imagery. The devastation extended for a considerable distance.
Reference
Planet Team 2025. Planet Application Program Interface: In Space for Life on Earth. San Francisco, CA. https://www.planet.com/