Landslides in Greece occur for many different reasons. One reason being earthquakes. When the plates shift this causes rocks to break and create landslides. The eastern part of the country are composed of geological formations and tangential movements. Intense folding and and fracturing result in alpine formations. Not only do these natural formation play a major role in landslides, urbanization and development are also a crucial contributing facto to these natural disasters. In a 2 and a half year time span there has been over 250 land slides.
Since 1950 to current day, landslides have been recorded on the relational database management system. Studies have been done to predict future landslides. According to Geosciences "
The prediction ability was found to be 75.2% indicating an acceptable susceptibility map obtained from the GIS-based bivariate statistical model". This helps with future preparedness for all the islands.
Weather can also be a huge contributing factor to landslides. Though this can cause large landslides its much easier to be prepared for this type of event.
www.mdpi.com/journal/geosciences
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-28680-2_37#page-1
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013795200000430d
Like Greece, Iceland's landslides are caused by earthquakes (and subsequent volcanic activity) and the weather. The amount of snow that Iceland gets each winter is a major factor in their avalanche probability. The also tended to build villages at the base of mountains making their susceptibility to catastrophes much higher had they build these areas away from the mountains. After a catastrophic avalanche in 1995 they actually built a protective wall to stop the avalanches from continuing to endanger the village. And so far it's worked. Thanks for the info on Greece!
ReplyDeleteEarthquakes play a major role in Egypt's landslides however, it is flooding that is the number one factor. Considering there is weather forecasts that can alert to heavy rainfall this can be apart of awareness and prevention in Greece. Along with seismic readings Greece can use the weather forecasts to establish alert systems. Since Greece does experience landslides due to countless reasons, education is key. Bringing awareness to the public will lessen damage and speed up recovery measures.
ReplyDeleteLike, Greece, Germany has many landslides that are caused by earthquakes. Germany has many highways that are threatened because of the rocky terrain that is surrounding the entire country. Millions of German dollars have been used towards preventing landslides, but sometimes even the precautions this country takes doesn't always prevent them from occurring. Great post!
ReplyDeleteAs you point out, the earthquakes in the area do not help the stability of the soil...A very interesting approach is using ArcGIS techniques to map the risk areas. If nothing else, we cna avoid those?..
ReplyDeletefile:///C:/Users/Owner/Downloads/geosciences-04-00176.pdf
http://esdac.jrc.ec.europa.eu/Library/Themes/Landslides/Meeting102007/Greece_Landslides.pdf