Californians are familiar with landslides that occur around storms, when saturated soil and rock loses its grip and slips from its perch on the substrate.
Californians are familiar with landslides that occur around storms, when saturated soil and rock loses its grip and slips from its perch on the substrate. These types of landslides can be triggered by intense rainfall, and incoming storms can be a warning that neighborhoods need to evacuate.
Landslides that happen during the hot, dry summers, though, tend to take people by surprise. In July 2023, for example, a landslide seemed to come out of nowhere to devastate a neighborhood in Rolling Hills Estates, located on the northern side of the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles County.
Now, landslide researchers at UCLA and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, have published a paper in Geophysical Research Letters that shows that the 2023 Rolling Hills Estates event was a slow-moving, progressive landslide that began the winter before, when unusually heavy rainfall infiltrated into the slope and reduced its strength. The researchers used satellite data to measure minute shifts in the surface of the affected area before, during and after the slide and concluded that this method could be used to detect future landslides before they become catastrophic.
Read more at University of California - Los Angeles
Photo Credit: Dave Proffer via Wikimedia Commons
