The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
Of course, allow me to start by wishing all my readers a Happy 2026. I suspect that we are in for quite a landslide journey again this year.
In late November, a very interesting open access paper (Darrow and Jacobs 2025) was published on the journal Landslides. This piece of work sought to understand the patterns of landslides in Alaska over a century through the creation of a database compiled from “a combination of 24 digital newspapers and online media sources, including historic digitised Alaskan newspapers”. Such a study is an epic amount of work, but yields fantastic data. This study is no exception.
What is of particular interest here is that Alaska suffers from a range of landslide hazards, and suffers significant losses from them, and it is an environment in which climate change is clearly occurring, with warming at a rate that is higher than the global average. Previous studies have shown that this is having a measurable impact on landslides in the mountains of Alaska.
In total, Darrow and Jacobs (2025) have identified 281 landslides since 1883 in Alaska, with the occurrence showing a strong seasonal pattern associated primarily with seasonal patterns of rainfall. The headline from the paper is summarised in this graphic from the paper:-
The recorded incidence of landslides in Alaska by decade, from
Darrow and Jacobs (2025).
The data shows a dramatic increase in landslides in recent decades, and in particular in the last two decades or so. Of course, care is needed to ensure that this is not an artefact of the reporting of landslides, but Darrow and Jacobs (2025) explored this issue in detail, concluding that the signal is real. Fortunately, the number of fatalities caused by landslides in Alaska is small, and there is no significant trend in terms of fatal landslides.
So what lies behind this change? Darrow and Jacobs (2025) show that the increase in occurrence of landslides in Alaska is associated with a marked increase in in average annual air temperature that ranges between 1.2 C and 3.4 C, and an associated increase in precipitation that ranges from 3% to 27%, over the 50 years.
Of course, warming is not going to stop in Alaska in the next few decades, so the likely direction of travel in terms of landslides there is clear. There is recognition in Alaska that greater attention will be needed on landslides.
But more widely, this is further quantitative evidence that the climate is having a big impact on landslide hazard. It is remarkable how the evidence just keeps accumulating.
Reference
Darrow, M.M. and Jacobs, A. 2025. Read all about it! A review of more than a century of Alaskan landslides as recorded in periodicals. Landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-025-02663-z.
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