Mass Movement

Sentinel-1 radar coverage from before and after the 1 April 2017 mudslide in Mocoa, Colombia. Triggered by heavy rain, the landslide caused greatest movement (red) on top of a mountain. It then pushed mud down across the city of Mocoa (green) and crossed the nearby river. The Sentinel-1-derived data product (from scans on 20 March and 1 April) has been overlaid onto a Sentinel-1 radar image. Image: Modified Copernicus

Definition

Mass movements can be defined as as any type of downslope movement of earth materials, such as sediment, soil and rock material. Mass movements are processes of erosion, transport and accumulation of material that occur on both gentle and steep slopes mainly owing to gravitational forces (IRDR Glossary).

These movements are generally associated with other disasters such as earthquakes, floods, thunderstorms and heavy rainstorm. They can be also associated with manmade hazards like construction roads, buildings, structures, infrastructure facilities.

Facts and figures

Mass movements occur based on several factors and causes differ depending on different regions. Mass movements are affected by the slope gradient, climate, rock type and structure, physical setting and geological and geomorphological outlines (Advances in Geosciences).

Mass-wasting events come in many shapes, sizes and speeds. Typically, the steeper the angle of a slope, the faster will be the down-slope movement of rock and sediment. Also, water can play a significant role in mass wasting, sometimes acting as the key component to a mass-wasting event, or serving as a lubricant within a mass of sediment and rock, enabling it to travel faster and further than it would otherwise.

One type of mass wasting can evolve into another type of mass wasting as the body of sediment/rock moves down a slope. This can make it difficult to classify a single event as being one type of mass wasting or another (Department of Geological Sciences, California State University).

A simple classification of the different types of mass wasting can be:

Falls (rock fall and rock avalanche)
Slides (rock slide, landslide and slump)
Flows (rock avalanche, debris flow, earth flow and creep).

Further information

FAO’s Mass movement control guidelines

Evaluation of Different Machine Learning Methods and Deep-Learning Convolutiona…

BC Campus Open Education, Classification of Mass Wasting

UN-SPIDER Regional Support Offices with hazard-specific expertise

Title: Argentina Regional Support Office

Title: Colombia Regional Support Office

Title: Germany Regional Support Office

Title: Greece Regional Support Office

Related content on the Knowledge Portal

Pacific Disaster Center DisasterAware Platform (PDC)
Publishing institution:
1. Pacific Disaster Center (PDC)
ISS-SERVIR Environmental Research and Visualization System (ISERV)
Publishing institution:
1. SERVIR
Landslide in the El Cambray 2 urban settlement in the metropolitan district of Guatemala City

At around 11 PM on the night of 1st October 2015, a landslide took place in the Santa Catarina municipal district of the greater metropolitan district of Guatemala City. The landslide affected an urban settlement called El Cambray 2. The National Coordinating Agency for Disaster Reduction of Guatemala (CONRED) activated its National Emergency Operations Center early in the morning on 02 October. As of 10:00 AM on 6^th October, the number of fatalities had risen to 161. CONRED estimates that there are still between 400 and 500 persons missing, as the landslide affected nearly 125 houses.
Search and rescue efforts continue with the aid of specialized rescue teams from Mexico and heavy machinery. Local experts are conducting assessments to determine the susceptibility to landslides of neighbouring areas and to identify ways to stabilize the ground. A local command post was…
read more
Risk Data Viewer, National Disaster Loss Data Collection Initiative and preview platform (GAR - UNDRR)
Publishing institution:
1. United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR)
Global Land Cover Facility (University of Maryland, NASA, GOFC-GOLD)
Publishing institution:
1. University of Maryland
Detailed rockslide mapping in northern Norway with small baseline and persistent scatterer interferometric SAR time series methods

Rockslides have a high socioeconomic and environmental importance in many countries. Norway is particularly susceptible to large rockslides due to its many fjords and steep mountains. One of the most dangerous hazards related with rock slope failures are tsunamis that can lead to large loss of life. It is therefore very important to systematically identify potential unstable rock slopes. Traditional landslide monitoring techniques are expensive and time consuming. Differential satellite interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) is an invaluable tool for land displacement monitoring. Improved…
read more
Comparison between automated and manual mapping of typhoon triggered landslides from SPOT-5 imagery

Two large tropical cyclones struck Taiwan in the summer of 2004 and landslides triggered by these events caused not only casualties and housing damage but also produced large volumes of sediment that entered rivers and reservoirs. For reservoir and watershed management it is important to quickly identify the location and areal extent of new landslides for coordinating mitigation efforts. In this study, two automated methods, supervised and unsupervised classification of 10m multi-spectral SPOT-5 imagery, were tested for…
read more
Geospatial technology in landslide mitigation - A case study in Nilgiris District

Landslides constitute one of the major natural catastrophes, which account for considerable loss of life and damage to communication routes, human settlements, agricultural and forestland. Most of the terrain in mountainous areas have been subjected to slope failures under the influence of variety of terrain factors and figured by events such as extreme rainfall or earthquake. In India, landslides are occurring frequently in Himalayan region in North and Western Ghats in South. Advancement in remote sensing technology…
read more
Landslide Susceptibility Mapping using Image Satellite and GIS Technology

Landslides are among the great destructive factors which cause lots of fatalities and financial losses all over the world every year. The aim of the research was landslide susceptibility mapping by remote sensing data processing and GIS spatial analysis. The area study in research is
central Zab basin in west Azerbaijan province, Iran. In this research, through geological maps and field studies, we primarily prepared a map for landslide distributions in Zab basin. Then, applying other information sources such as the existing thematic maps, we studied and defined the 8 factors such as, lithology, slope, slope aspect, annual rainfall, land use, distance to waterway, distance to the fault , and distance to road. That affect occurrence of the landslides. To get more precision, speed and facility in our analysis all descriptive and spatial information was entered into GIS system. After preparation of the…
read more
Characterization of Landslide Deformations in Three Gorges Area Using Multiple InSAR Data Stacks

In the areas with steep topography and vulnerable geological condition, landslide deformation monitoring is an important task for risk assessment and management. Differential Synthetic-Aperture Radar interferometry (D-InSAR) and Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PS-InSAR) are two advanced SAR Interferometry techniques for detection, analysis and monitoring of slow moving landslides. The techniques can be used to identify wide displacement areas and measure displacement ratesover long time series with millimeter-level…
read more