The earth landslides blog It is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
In April 2024, the city of Jiangwan, which is located in the administrative area of the city of Shaoguan of the province of Guangdong, China suffered extremely strong rains, triggering landslides and floods that caused extensive damage. A new article in the newspaper Earth landslides (Yang et al. 2025) has provided an interesting initial review of this event.
Jiangwan is in [24.6233, 113.2311]. He Planet The image below shows the area: This image was collected on March 12, 2024, before the rain event:-
As the image shows above, the landscape is mountainous with extensive forestry. Geology consists mainly of granite rocks that are very prone to weathering under the humid climate.
While April 2024 was unusually wet as a whole, the main rain event occurred from April 18 to 21. According Yang et al. (2025)447.9 mm of precipitation were recorded for a period of 72 hours in the area around Jiangwan, an exceptional total for this area. As expected, this intense rain in an area of steep and worn topography caused many landslides.
The planet Labs image below shows the same area as after the rain event. This area is exceptionally cloudy during the summer months, so the image is of October 4, 2024:-
The large amount of landslides is very clear in this image. This is better using a sliding control:-
Yang et al. (2025) They have mapped the landslides using Planet Images, which have a resolution of 3 m (which will limit the ability to map smaller land landslides). They registered 2,663 individual failures in an area of 154 km2mainly that consists of shallow landslides. Describe the impact:
“The air views reveal the devastation: the houses and the roads collapsed, the trees of the river crawled and the mud covered ground up to a deep meter, covered with rubble.”
He Planet The image below shows the area around Jiangwan, where the density of land landslides is particularly high:-
It is interesting to note that land landslides occurred in densely wooded areas. You can see debris paths in the channels, but it does not seem that there is a high level of channeled debris flows that we see in similar landslides events in, for example, Hong Kong. I suppose this is probably the result of a more moderate topography.
CTWANT published some images of the sequelae of the landslides, including the images of helicopters that show some of the landslides:–
This group of landslides in Jiangwan is good evidence of the ways in which the landscape is responding to the most intense rain events associated with climate change. Unfortunately, we will see many more events of this type in the coming years, and the costs they will inflict will be severe.
Reference
Yang, G., Zhao, L., Qin, Y. et al. 2025. Land landslides grouped by rain in the city of Jiangwan, the city of Shaoguan, province of Guangdong, China | Earth landslides. Earth landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-025-02463-5
Planet Team, 2025. Interface of the planet application program: in Space for Life on Earth. San Francisco, CA. https://www.planet.com/
Text © 2023. The authors. CC BY-NC -nd 3.0
Except when indicating otherwise, the images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission of the copyright owner is prohibited.
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