Sudden and unexpected, landslides and avalanches claim thousands of lives each year and cause billions of dollars in damage. What if we could see them coming?
All around the village of Kimtang, in central Nepal, are tell-tale signs that something isn’t right. There are cracks in the concrete steps of houses, trees growing at strange angles – evidence that the ground is shifting beneath the villagers’ feet. The question is, just how much is the ground moving?
“This is not good,” says Antoinette Tordesillas, a mathematician at the University of Melbourne, as she shows me an overhead view of Kimtang via Zoom. There’s a large red spot on the image, which is not any old satellite image but a coloured map created by an artificial intelligence (AI) system.
The AI has identified a large unstable area, right beneath the village, colouring it bright red amid the dark blue of the rest of the hillside. It means the village sits right on top of a spot at high risk of a potentially devastating landslide. “Their village, where they live and farm, are actually on the slope,” says Tordesillas. She and her colleagues have visited Nepal, and in some cases interviewed villagers about the slowly developing situation.
Landslides, she adds, might seem like sudden catastrophes that are impossible to predict. But satellite images captured using radar can reveal otherwise invisible signs of the ground starting to move days, weeks or even years in advance of a collapse. Granules of earth begin subtly separating from one another. “Dancers, if you like, following some kind of unwritten choreography,” says Tordesillas.
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