Innovation Winter 2025/26

Landslide types - at a glance

Movement mechanism

Size & speed

Type

Material

Typical triggers Monitoring challenges

Rock, soil, debris, or artificial fill

Varies: rotational,

Wide range of sizes and speeds

Rainfall, seismic activity, human disturbance, vegetation loss

Mapping and classification complex; probabilistic risk models used; susceptible to climate change effects Difficult to predict due to randomness; often triggered by minor disturbances Subsurface conditions hard to assess; fracture mapping essential; real-time monitoring possible but costly

translational, flow, topple, or fall Free fall, bouncing, or rolling from steep slopes or cliffs

Landslide

Individual rock blocks

Freeze-thaw cycles, root growth, vibrations, erosion

Small volume, very fast

Rockfall

Large masses of fractured rock

Sliding along a failure surface, often controlled by fractures

Larger volume, moderate to fast

Combined factors (e.g., rainfall + fracture arrangement); require specific geometry for release

Rockslide

rockfalls: “to trigger something that’s millions of cubic metres, it takes more than just the random things that trigger rockfalls,” Whittall explained. Confounding things further is our changing climate. Glaciers retreating further as our climate warms can remove key supports to otherwise stable rock faces, sending them tumbling down mountainsides during thaws. More rain events can increase erosion and infiltration, while drought conditions can lead to fracture expansion, vegetation depletion, and root decay (which could be holding back a rock face), and make the area more susceptible to slides during sudden massive rainfalls. These, among other combined factors, turn the task of developing accurate rockslide predictions into a quixotical quest. “It is truly a probabilistic thing,” Whittall said. “Because there’s a chain of events that are all That said, there are tools and systems to identify the probabilities, enabling engineers and geoscientists to take mitigating action to reduce the risk to human life and property. The first step to determining the potential for a given rockslide to occur is to look at historical data tracked in inventory maps. These records identify locations of previous landslide events. They may include the event’s extent (how far it slid), classification (rockslide, landslide, avalanche, or another event type), volume probabilistic that come together.” Mapping out the problems

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Innovation Winter 2025/26

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