Ask a seismologist for an earthquake catalog and you'll be asked to name your place; they're a dime a dozen these days. Do the same for a landslide catalog and you'd be hard pressed to find more than a handful in existence! And yet these data are fundamentally important for reasons to do with hazards, rates of continental erosion, hillslope evolution, and as signatures of tectonic activity.

One approach that we are taking here (but see also our other landslide box) is perform physical experiments in the landslide behavior of Phaseolus vulgaris (red kidney beans). These follow in spirit the experiments inspired by Per Bak in his work on self-organized criticality, but more specifically develop the first experiments by our colleague, A. L. Densmore at ETH, Switzerland.

Contact Mike Ellis for more information.

Landslides and Topography | Active Tectonics - Landscape Evolution | CERI & DES | University of Memphis