Forecasts for the 2026 South Asia monsoon are for below average rainfall, but some of the most landslide prone areas of India may receive totals that are above average.

As usual, we are now starting to see the number of reported global fatal landslides increase as the northern hemisphere rainy season commences. In recent days, there have been fatal floods and landslides across several provinces of mainland China as well as landslides on the pilgrimage route to Kederath in northern India.

The global pattern is dominated by the South Asia (southwest / summer) monsoon, so it is interesting at this point to to consider the prospects for this year. The monsoon itself is expected to start in SW India next week, timing that is normal. It will then build over the following month or so.

The current forecast for the monsoon itself is that the total rainfall is likely to be below average. This is the WMO forecast:-

The map shows below average precipitation for much of South Asia. The IMD also forecasts below average rainfall.

Of course, in landslide terms we are interested mainly in SW India (Kerala), which has a below average forecast, and the mountainous areas of Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. Much of this is also forecast to receive below average precipitation, but note the above average forecast for parts of northern India (Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh) and NE India (Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh). These are some of the most landslide-prone areas of India, suggesting that we may well see substantial landslide challenges in these areas.

The caveat of course is that monsoon-triggered landslides are sensitive to rainfall intensity as well as rainfall magnitude. A below average monsoon can bring intense rainfall events that trigged catastrophic landslides. Unfortunately, the forecasts cannot resolve this issue.

As an aside, the next few days in the European Alps will be interesting. We are about to see a few days of unusually high temperatures, which are likely to drive a wave of snowmelt and permafrost thawing. Given the time of year, this could well trigger extensive rockfall activity.

Unfortunately, by the time I get to Switzerland in nine days the weather is forecast to have reverted to cool drizzle!

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The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.

I’ve not posted about Landslides in Art much in recent years – the most recent edition was almost two years ago – but loyal readers will know that this is a long running series of posts.

Anyway, I came across a page recently about the major landslide that struck the village of Runswick Bay in North Yorkshire. It includes a painting of the village with the above name, by an artist who signed themselves as “Jotter”. The painting is now in the collection of the Kirkleatham Museum:-

Now, there is a twist in that the landslide actually occurred in 1662, not 1664!

Runswick Bay is a picture postcard village in North Yorkshire of the UK, located at [54.53356, -0.75015]. The coastal part of the village is built on landslide debris, and there has been some movement in recent decades. In the late 1990s a very large scheme was put in place to mitigate the ongoing movement.

This is a Google Earth view of the village:-

The Tees Valley Museums site describes the landslide of 1662, noting that there were two major failure events. It is very fortunate that no-one was killed. The village was essentially destroyed and then rebuilt to the south of the original site.

It is probably true to say that the painting by Jotter is not a classic, but it does capture some interesting aspects of the site. First, it appears that the morphology is that of an existing landslide mass – this was probably a reactivation rather than a first time failure. Second, the toe was actively eroding, so maybe the two phase failure involved a collapse at the toe, which then destabilised the mass upslope? This would fit the eyewitness reports. Finally, note the mass in the background, which is also the result of a series of failure events.

There are many other major landslides along this section of coast – it is a classic area of UK mass movement geology. And it is truly beautiful too – visit if you can.

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Since 1994 there has been a 32 times increase in the number of research outputs with the keyword “landslide”.

In a couple of weeks time, I have the pleasure of being one of the invited speakers at the Landslide Risk and Geoengineering (LaRGE) Conference in Queenstown, New Zealand. Ahead of that presentation, I’ve been using Scopus to look at the growth of research in landslides since 1994, the year that I submitted my PhD thesis.

This graph, from Scopus, shows the number of research outputs per year that use the keyword “landslide”. It is simple and unfiltered:-

The extraordinary growth in productivity is clear – to put it into context, in 1994 the number of outputs was 182; in 2025, it was 5,875, a 32x increase. This is a remarkable improvement in the volume of our understanding of landslides, although it does not say anything about paradigm change.

It is interesting to look at some of the key publications for landslide research:-

The journal Landslides started in 2004 and has shown remarkable growth (although note it still represents a tiny proportion of the total outputs per year). There are also large increases in the journals Natural Hazards and Engineering Geology, and a smaller increase for journal Geomorphology. On the other hand, those journals that traditionally would have been associated with landslide research, such as QJEGH, Canadian Geotechnical Journal and Geotechnique, have remained essentially static over time.

I suspect that this represents a growth in the academic areas researching landslides, and in particular a diversification from geotechnical engineering to a much more broader range of research that encompasses people with an interest in geomorphology, remote sensing, geophysics and natural hazards.

There is one other element that is important here too, which is the growth of landslide research in China. This graph shows the same data as above but with China as the national affiliation of one or more author:-

The growth in landslide research productivity in China is explosive over the last ten years, and with 2,616 outputs in 2025, Chinese affiliated authors are now producing over 55% of the world’s landslide research. There is no doubt as to where the centre of gravity now lies in landslide science.

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On 19 July 2025, record-breaking rainfall triggered a landslide that destroyed 26 buildings. Plans are now being developed to permanently relocate the community.

On 19 July 2025, parts of South Korea suffered record-breaking rainfall. Flooding and landslides were the inevitable outcome. One location that was particularly severely impacted was a small rural village called Sangneung, which is located in Saengbi-riang-myeon, Sangcheong. It is incredibly difficult to track down village locations in South Korea, but after a lot of work I think it is at [35.38269, 128.05740].

This landslide has attracted considerable attemtion because of the damage it has inflicted. There is a good news report that includes a drone video of the site on Youtube:-

The drone footage starts at 00:33.

This image, released by the local government, also shows the site:-

There is a good reflective piece on the plight of the inhabitants of Sancheong, outlining why the village is now longer viable. A decision has now been taken to permanently relocate the village, and detailed plans are being developed.

This is an unusual intervention, but it is hard to argue that it is not the correct one.

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In November 2025, Cyclone Senyar generated extreme rainfall in parts of Sumatra, Indonesia, triggering thousands of landslides. Our new paper in the journal Current Biology demonstrates that these landslides might have a devastating impact on a critically endangered population of Tapanuli orangutan.

In November 2025, Cyclone Senyar brought extreme rainfall to large parts of Sumatra in Indonesia. I have written about this on previous occasions – the rainfall triggered vast numbers of landslides.

In my line of work, we often focus on the landslide impacts on the landscape, on human lives and on infrastructure. We rarely consider the impacts on th eanimal population. This is certainly a weakness that the Cyclone Senyar event brings to focus.

Part of the area devastated by the landslides is that slopes around the Batang Toru rover, an area of forest that is home to a rare species of orangutang. These great apes, Pongo tapanuliensis, live in a habitat known as the West Block of Tapanuli. There are only 800 individuals left in the wild, a situation that is highly precarious. The loss of even a small number of adults could tip the species towards extinction.

I was a part of a consortium of scientists that considered the landslide impacts of Cyclone Senyar on the habitat of these orangutangs. The results have just been published in the journal Current Biology (Meijaard et al. 2026) – the paper is open access and published under a creative commons license.

This image, from the paper, shows the landslide impacts of Cyclone Senyar:-

In the study area of 71,161 hectares, the mapping indicates that there were 50, 185 individual landslides, covering a surface area of 8,303 hectares. This is about 11% of the forested area. We then estimate the likely loss of the orangutang population, which is likely to be in the range of 18-120 individuals, with a central estimate of 58 individuals. This is likely to have been a devastating loss for this highly endangered population.

This level of habitat loss might also be placing a severe pressure on the remaining population, so further fatalities are very possible through, for example, reduced food availability.

The intensity of the rainfall was almost certainly supercharged by climate change. The impacts of Cyclone Senyar are being replicated widely – and of course we are now in the northern hemisphere tropical cyclone season again.

Our paper makes some policy recommendations for this population of orangutans. First, the government of Indonesia needs to permanently protect this area of forest against mining , palm oil and hydropower developments. Ideally, the protected area should be expanded. Second, Indonesia needs support for biodiversity-recovery, hazard forecasting and ecological restoration planning.

Reference

Meijaard, E. … Petley. D. … et al. 2026, Extreme rainfall further endangers the world’s rarest great ape. Current Biology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2026.05.029

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A wonderful new paper on the huge Tracy Arm landslide and tsunami will have profound but challenging implications for the management of risk in an age of increased tourism and rapid climate change.

The journal Science has published an excellent new paper (Shugar et al. 2026) that examines the extraordinary 10 August 2025 landslide and tsunami at Tracy Arm fjord in Alaska. The paper is open access, so you can read it for yourself (it is very accessible), and there has been a plethora of media coverage (quite rightly).

I wrote about this event at the time and in the aftermath, but Shugar et al. (2026) is the authorative source. There is little for me to add to the science, but AGU Eos has a really excellent write up and explainer that I thoroughly recommend.

That large landslides occur in fjords is not a surprise, and that they can generate enormous displacement waves is also not news. We know that landslide occurrence in these environments in general is increasing, and specifically so in Alaska. However, this paper is the most comprehensive and systematic analysis of such an event, and it has shown the remarkable threat that these events can generate. The tsunami created by this landslide had a 481 metre run-up; it is remarkable that there were no fatalities. If a large cruise ship had been in the area, with passengers being ferried ashore on small boats and exploring the shoreline, the consequences would have been catastrophic. It is unsurprising then that cruise companies are now amending their itineraries.

The USGS released the image below of the aftermath of the landslide and tsunami – scale is hard to understand in such images, but the crown of the landslide is over 1,000 metres above the level of the fjord, and the landslide had a subaerial volume of over 63 million cubic metres.

Shugar et al. (2026) has a brief section that examines the implications of this event, and of the understanding that it provides of the hazards posed by very large landslides in fjord settings. These are locations with extensive human activity – local communities, trade, fishing and tourism. There is some evidence that these landsldies are more likely to occur in the spring and summer months, when human occupation is higher. Our resilience to a tsunami wave that starts off being hundreds of metres high is low.

A case in point lies in Milford Sound in New Zealand, where (for example) an earthquake on the Alpine Fault has the potential to trigger a large landslide that could result in a major tsunami. Milford Sound is an extremely popular tourism location. Should such an event occur, and mass fatalities result, there is no doubt that the public inquiry would find that the societal risk was known and that it was probably unacceptable. However, to ban tourism, including cruise ships, in this area would carry heavy risks in its own right – it would profoundly impact the vital tourist economy of the area, on which many livelihoods depend. This is a substantial risk in its own right, and of course politics plays a major part too. Balancing these risks is a major challenge for any society.

Some hope is offered by the fact that this landslide showed substantial precursory seismic activity, which might represent a route to providing a warning for at least some of these rock slope failures. But research in this area is immature at the moment, and of course there will be no warning for a landslide triggered by a major earthquake.

So, the landslide at Tracy Arm fjord presents us with a host of major challenges, but it also represents a big step forward in our understanding of these events. Well done to Dan and his colleagues for another brilliant paper. I shall watch the debate with great interest.

Reference

Shugar et al. 2026. A 481-meter-high landslide-tsunami in a cruise ship–frequented Alaska fjord. Science, eaec3187. DOI:10.1126/science.aec3187

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Ten people were killed in a large landslide in Papua New Guinea triggered by heavy rainfall associated with Tropical Cyclone Maila.

On 9 April 2026, a large landslide occurred at Lamarain in the Inland Baining LLG of Gazelle District in Papua New Guinea. The landslide was triggered by heavy rainfall associated with the passage of Tropical Cyclone Maila.

Media reports indicate that ten people were killed by the landslide and that a further 18 people were injured. Baining is located at [-4.2548, 151.7811], so I assume that this is the general area.

Gaining information about landslides in the remote areas of Papua New Guinea is very challenging – the terrain is rugged and there is a high level of civil turmoil. But the best source of information is on the Facebook page of NBC East Britain, which has posted a helicopter video of the aftermath. This is a still from that video:-

There are several interesting aspects of this landslide. First, the failure appears to have initiated high on the hillslope in an area that has a mix of forestry and cleared areas. The source appear to be quite large and deep-seated. This has transitioned into a disrupted debris slide / avalanche with a substantial amount of entrainment.

Note also the multiple other landslides in that area, all fresh, suggesting that the intense rainfall was sufficient to drive widespread failures. It is interesting to note though that is event did not involve multiple shallow landslides that combined to create a channelised debris flow.

The Post Courier reports that the Lamerain landslide occurred in two phases, the first at 6 am on 9 April 2026 and the second 24 hours later. However, other reports suggest that it occurred on 12 April 2026, underlying the challenges of properly understanding landslides in Papua New Guinea.

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New evidence from the Natural Hazards Commission – Toka Tū Ake (NHC) shows that landslides are now New Zealand’s most costly natural hazard.

New Zealand is a country that is prone to a range of natural hazards. Located on a series of major fault systems, earthquakes cause high levels of loss. The country is also volcanically active, with occasional tragedies. Heavy rainfall brings floods.

To share the cost of these perils, following the 1942 Wairarapa earthquakes, the New Zealand government established the Earthquake Commission (EQC) in 1945, initially focusing on earthquakes and war damage, but subsquently expanded to cover other natural hazards.

In the subsequent years, the EQC has evolved into the Natural Hazards Commission – Toka Tū Ake (NHC), with a purpose “to reduce the impact of natural hazards on people, property, and the community”. Essentially it operates as a financial pool, with home owners paying a levy on top of their insurance to generate the fund. In the event of a loss, the fund pays for the rebuild costs up to a cap (currently NZ$300,000); the remainder is then covered by the property’s insurance. Claims are funded directly from the pool, with reinsurance cover and ultimately a government guarantee in place to ensure that there are sufficient funds.

In reality, NHC does much more than this, acting to manage and settle claims, and to understand the range of hazards to which New Zealand is prone.

In the last few days, a range of media outlets in New Zealand have been reporting new data from NHC about losses from natural hazards in New Zealand. This is the headline from 1News:

“Landslides are New Zealand’s most expensive natural hazard – and new data reveals a sharp rise in damage claims and growing risks to homes, infrastructure and communities.”

In total, since 2021 NHC has received 13,000 landslide claims and has paid out NZ$322 million (US$191 million). New Zealand is seeing an abrupt increase in landslide losses, driven primarily by increasingly frequent high magnitude rainfall events. NHC is urging property owners to undertake preventative maintenance and to be aware of the limitations of EQC cover.

In common with many other places, these landslide hazards represent a major challenge to New Zealand. The landscape has many dormant landslides that are being reactivated by these increased rainfall events, and many new failures are also occurring. But, generating reliable risk maps for landslides remains a major challenge. This needs to be a major research focus in the coming years. It will require better understanding of triggering events (rainfall and earthquakes primarily); of the initiation processes within the slope; of runout / debris mobility; and of vulnerability and consequent losses. It is probably true to say that in all of these areas, landslide research lags behind that of earthquakes and floods, primarily because of a lack of long term investment.

In many countries, landslides are not an insured risk for this reason. On its own, this will be a major challenge that must be addressed. For those countries in which landslides are insured, we need quickly to get up to speed.

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Initial analyses suggest that the earthquake this morning has the potential to have triggered significant numbers of landslides and areas of liquefaction.

At the time of writing, the impacts of the M=7.8 earthquake that occurred offshore the south coast of Mindanao in the Philippines remain unclear. Initial reports in the local press suggest 15 fatalities so far, but as always it could be the case that there is no information from those areas most seriously impacted.

The USGS Pager site is the best source of information about potential landslide impacts, bearing in mind there is a high level of uncertainty. This estimates that the area exposed to landslides is at the high end of the “significant” scale and that the population exposed to landslides lies in the 1,000 to 10,000 people range. This is the Pager landslide hazard map:-

The area with the highest level of landslide hazard is remote and rural, so we may not get good information from this area for a while.

The potential for liquefaction may be even more serious, with a broad swathe having a high level of hazard:-

Past earthquakes have generated large liquefaction-related landslides on low angle slopes, with devastating effects. Hopefully, there won’t have been an event on this scale in Mindanao.

One final point to note is that the Philippines is just entering the typhoon season. Fortunately, Mindanao is sufficiently far south to be away from the main typhoon zone. However, these storms are so large that they can bring very heavy rainfall – see for example Typhoon Bopha in 2012. A similar event this year could have very significant consequences.

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In April 2026 I recorded 36 fatal landslides causing 90 fatalities, the lowest monthly total for 2026 to date.

This is my regular update for the number of fatal global landslides, focusing on March 2026. As usual, this data has been collected in line with the methodology described in Froude and Petley (2018) and in Petley (2012). References are listed below – please cite these articles if you use this analysis. Data presented in these updates should be treated as being provisional at this stage as I will reanalyse them prior to formal publication, and other events will emerge.

The headline figures are as follows:

March 2026: 36 fatal landslides causing 90 fatalities;

This is an interesting result, unusually showing that fatal landslides in April were substantially lower than for any of the preceding months in 2026. This is the updated annual chart by month:-

Loyal readers will know that I like to present the running total using pentads (five day blocks). This is the cumulative total pentad graph to the end of Pentad 24 (which captures all of the events to the end of April):-

Thus, whilst April 2026 was unexceptional compared with the previous months of this year, the number of fatal landslides was still above the long term mean. Overall, 2026 continues to run extremely hot, exceeding even the record-breaking year of 2024.

We now start to enter the crucial period of much higher global fatal landslide occurrence. Whilst in the long term dataset this acceleration typically occurs in June (or even July), in recent years it has happened in May, as the 2024 line shows. I will watch with great interest to see what happens this month.

As I always stress, the occurrence of fatal landslides prior to the South and East Asia rainy seasons is not a predictor of what will happen in that period. Interestingly, the WMO is forecasting a below average summer monsoon in South Asia.

References

Froude, M. and Petley, D.N. 2018.  Global fatal landslide occurrence from 2004 to 2016.  Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 18, 2161-2181.

Petley, D.N. 2012. Global patterns of loss of life from landslides. Geology 40 (10), 927-930.

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A new study (Sun et al. 2026) shows that in six earthquakes in China between 2010 and 2022, landslides and rockfalls were responsible for at least half of the total fatalities.

It is well-established that landslides are a major cause of loss of life in earthquakes in mountainous areas. The seismology maxim that “it is not earthquakes that kill people, it’s collapsing buildings” does not apply in its pure form in mountains – landslides also kill large numbers of people.

However, the actual number of people killed by landslides in earthquakes is poorly understood. This is largely due to the challenges of collecting reliable information in the aftermath of a major earthquake, when the focus is on rescue and recovery rather than data collection. For this reason, many studies of landslide fatalities do not include seismically-triggered events. This is true of my own work.

However, a study has just been published (Sun et al. 2026) in the journal Natural Hazards Review that starts to address this issue. The paper nominally examines fatalities from all causes from earthquakes in China from 2001 to 2022. However, the authors note that the data has low reliability until 2010, so I’ll focus on the period from 2010 to 2022. I also note that the authors use the term “geological hazards“, which is a little broader than landslides. I should note that the paper isa broad look at fatalities from earthquakes – there is a much richer range of analyses than I will cover here.

In the period from 2010 to 2022, Sun et al. (2026) identified 14 earthquakes in which geological hazards caused loss of life. In some cases, the impacts were substantial. Thus, the M=6.5 3 August 2014 earthquake at Ludian in Yunnan led to 134 fatalities and 40 people missing from geological hazards from a total of 728 fatalities (c.24 % of the total), whilst the 5 September 2022 M=6.8 earthquake at Luding in Sichuan led to 76 geological hazard fatalities and 25 missing from a total of 118 fatalities (c.86% of the total). In six of the 14 examples, geological hazards caused at least 50% of the fatalities.

Sun et al. (2026) highlight that “fatalities from geological hazards concentrate in geologically complex, mountainous provinces, i.e., Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu, Guangxi, and Guizhou”. They note that even small events can trigger fatal landslides – for example, six people were killed in a rockfall triggered by a M=4.3 earthquake in Guizhou in 2010, whilst a M=2.8 aftershock from the Yanjin earthquake in 2006 triggered a rockfall that killed a person.

This is an incredibly useful study. It starts to shed light on the impact of landslides in large earthquakes. It is not the definitive study, and questions remain – not least, the pattern of landslide losses in very large earthquakes, like the 2010 Wenchuan event, in which landslides were ferocious. But it forms the basis for such investigations, starting to fill a major gaps in our understanding.

Reference

Sun, B. et al. 2026. Causes Analysis of Earthquake-Related Deaths in Mainland China 2001–2022. Natural Hazards Review, 27 [2]. https://doi-org.ntu.idm.oclc.org/10.1061/NHREFO.NHENG-2458

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On 19 July 2025, intense, long duration rainfall triggered over 550 landslides in Sancheong, South Korea, killing at least 10 people.

On 19 July 2025, extremely heavy rainfall triggered multiple landslides in Sancheong, South Korea. This event has been described by a new paper (Nguyen et al. 2026) just published in the journal Landslides. The paper is behind a paywall, but this link should give you access at the time of writing.

The core of the affected area is at [35.4333, 127.9111] (as usual, Landslides provides the location in degrees minutes and seconds when digital degrees is so much more useful – a pet frustration of mine!). This is a Planet Labs image of a part of the area, captured before the event. The marker is at the coordinate noted above:-

And this is the same area after 19 July 2025:-

And here is a slider to allow a comparison:-

Nguyen et al. (2026) have mapped 568 individual landslides triggered by this rainfall event, triggered by rainfall in the range of 498 – 619 mm over a c. 55 hour period. These landslides killed at least 10 people and caused damage to homes and infrastructure. It is estimated that the restoration costs are in the order of US$800 million.

In common with many other events of this type, the landslides are mainly shallow, translational failures in soil or regolith on steeper slopes. As I have frequently noted, such terrain is very susceptible to unusually intense rainfall events, which often trigger a cluster of landslides in close proximity. These often merge to form channelised debris flows. Nguyen et al. (2026) note however that their modelling indicates that it was a combination of the intensity of the rainfall and its duration that led to these failures.

As rainfall intensities increase due to climate change, we are seeing increasing numbers of these landslide clusters. I greatly welcome studies such as Nguyen et al. (2026) , which allow us to build understanding in each case.

Reference and acknowledgement

Nguyen, H.H.D., Song, C.H. & Kim, Y.T. 2026. Physically based data-driven analysis for large-scale investigation of the July 2025 rainfall-induced landslide in Sancheong, South Korea. Landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-026-02778-x

Planet Team 20246. Planet Application Program Interface: In Space for Life on Earth. San Francisco, CA. https://www.planet.com/

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