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Criteria for inclusion?

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Other than has reliable sources, what are the criteria for including any particular landslide (or group of landslides) on this list? Obviously, any landslide which is in the range of tens of millions of cubic meters, or one which kills thousands of people, is probably worth including, but where are the limits? What would make a biger or more deadly landslide worth including?

The 21st century part of the list is already nearly as big as the 20th century, and that will remain true even once I'm done transferring landslides from list of historic landslides, primarily because of better (and more net-accessible) news coverage. Having some sort of criteria will keep the 21st century section from overwhelming the 20th century section.

Also, geologically speaking, what qualifies? Classic rotational and translational slides, and debris flows should count, ob|(talk)]] 18:36, 25 November 1054 (UTC)

In my personal (unprofessional but educated) opinion, landslides can be of any sufficient size. Rockslide also count. Rockfalls probably don't, as it's just some rocks falling without a fundamental slip of the terrain. Avalanches are related, but they're made of snow which is transient by its nature. (However, on moons in the outer Solar System, permanent non-flowing ice that is considered part of the fundamental terrain could be considered a landslide if the terrain slips.) Pyroclastic flows, like avalanches, are made of transient material that require great heating of hot gases and material. However, the natural landslide that triggered the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helen would qualify, as it unplugged the vent rather than being erupted from it—the landslide itself was also largely cooled rock that was being pushed by newer hotter rock from underneath. I'm uncertain whether to say all mudslides (including lahars) are landslides, though some of them probably are, since they already have many features in common (both landslides and mudslides can be triggered by oversaturation of water in the ground). - Gilgamesh (talk) 19:41, 25 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Lots of good questions there. For earthquakes I came up with a set of criteria for notability but there you have parameters such as magnitude and intensity, and several reliable global or local catalogues to check them out. For landslides it's more difficult, although I agree that more than one death, mentions in the media (other than just at the time) and coverage in scientific papers would all establish notability. That will still leave quite a lot of landslides to deal with. For the older ones, it you can find them in reliable sources, then that's almost definitely OK. For ones that are very recent, we don't have the benefit of hindsight to help us decide on the notability. This list will I think naturally evolve into separate lists referring to pre-historic, pre-20th century, 20th century and 21st century (which might eventually be split into individual decades - I'm fairly sure that will happen to the list of 21st-century earthquakes).
As to types of 'landslides' in the broad sense, I think that avalanches should be separate unless they involved rock as they move downslope, pyroclastic flows definitely not I think, but lahars just as clearly yes (once formed they develop just like mudslides), earthflows, flowslides, mudslides, debris flows, rockslides all OK. Rockfalls, there I think that if a single block falls on somebody, probably not but some rockfalls have a perceptible runout, so may qualify. As to individual events versus groups of events, they're both OK, groups of landslides are generally triggered by the same event, earthquake or tropical storm rainfall, so can be considered together. Mikenorton (talk) 20:29, 25 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
There's a paper by the USGS Significant Landslide Events in the United States, which lists quite a few landslides in the U.S. There are probably similar catalogs for most countries which have agencies equivalent to the USGS, and the USGS may have some of those catalogs in translation. Argyriou (talk) 00:56, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Unsourced landslides from list of historic landslides, to be added to list as references are found:

20th century

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21st Century

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sourced:

  • Lincang mudslide in Yunnan, China killed 82 people on November 2008 [1]
  • Massive Landslide caused 38 families about 107 people buried in Anshun City of Guizhou Province, China on June 28, 2010.[2]
  • Landslide killed 92 people in Puladi, Yunnan on August 17, 2010.[3]

188.168.17.214 (talk) 06:20, 4 October 2013 (UTC): What about this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolka-Karmadon_rock_ice_slide[reply]

Argyriou (talk) 15:59, 1 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sources

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Sources for more landslides:

Argyriou (talk) 07:06, 2 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

March 12 2011 trim

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I will remove some less notable or unsourced events from the list and put them here. Feelfree to discuss. I have rough criteria in mind, but typing them would be too long. Circeus 8:27, March 12, 2011 (UTC) The years are missing from the copied elements.

Other historic landslide

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— Preceding unsigned comment added by 219.23.5.48 (talk) 14:01, 12 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

glaring omission

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wanted to let you know that a very important event that is missing is the 1959 Hebgen Lake landslide that created Quake Lake, in Montana; there is ample documentation — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.94.82.170 (talk) 08:30, 31 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See: 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 187.189.207.135 (talk) 22:26, 18 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

volumes of material need revision

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The volume estimates are presented in abbreviated units of Mm3, or km3. But I think these are, in many instances erroneous. For example, the Bingham Canyon landslide has published estimates of ~65 million cubic meters of material. (*See below) That is, 65 x 10^6 cubic meters. This is equal to 0.065 cubic km, which would normally be notated as 0.065 km3, or 0.000000065 Mm3. I checked the sizes of various other slides on Google Earth and found similar discrepancies. I am a geology professor, but not a wiki editor, so I hope someone who edits regularly will attend to this issue.

71.235.73.140 (talk) 05:23, 4 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The non-standard unit Mm3 is regularly used in the literature to denote million cubic metres - see for instance for the Khait landslides [1]. This is explained in the lead section. Mikenorton (talk) 08:10, 4 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
@Mikenorton:I've found that Mm3 is used in this article and others to mean million m3, but as the article says, it is "non-standard". Based on SI units and prefixes, Mm3 is cubic megameters, that is cubes 1000 km on a side. That is the same way that a km2 is a square kilometer rather than 1000 square meters. Would there be any objection to changing to MCM (million cubic meters), which while it is not a standard SI unit, is not wrong. Thanks.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  02:11, 28 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
No objection to that, at least it shouldn't confuse anybody (apparently that should really be a cubic hectometre, so to some extent still non-standard) - as with all units, people aim for something that gives an easy to understand range, with most major landslides falling into the 1-1000 MCM range. Mikenorton (talk) 13:18, 28 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Done. Thanks for the feedback.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  02:49, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hurricane Helene produced a number of landslides in North Carolina including at least one that took out I-40 Hurricane Clyde 🌀my talk page! 23:07, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ok I withdraw my request. It is clear that this is a list of single landslides. Helene produced multiple (dozens) slides. And I don’t have the info on the volume. Hurricane Clyde 🌀my talk page! 20:31, 30 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]