Friday, May 9, 2014

Today's Worry: Landslides

And they're getting worse!
According to research by David Petley, a geographer at Durham University, the number of casualties caused by landslides has been massively underestimated. In a 2012 paper for the journal Geology, he calculated that between 2004 and 2010, there were 2,620 fatal landslides around the world, killing a total of 32,322 people. As Nature points out, that means landslides kill far more people than wildfire and about half as many as floods. … Petley’s data seems to indicate that the number of landslides around the world is increasing, likely due to “increases in population, precipitation intensity, and environmental degradation.”
UPDATE: And while some people are worrying about landslides, others are focused on How to Protect Your Car from Squirrels.

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