For 50 years, visitors to Alaska's Denali National Park were ferried by shuttle buses along a 92-mile road to take in sweeping vistas, watch rambling bears, moose and caribou and gaze at the snowy flanks of North America's tallest peak. Not this year. This summer and next year, the park's sole road will remain closed at its halfway point, victim to a warming climate that has triggered the collapse of a mountain slope. The site, called Pretty Rocks, is at a high point on the unpaved road. Since last August, it has been considered unsafe for public travel. The landslide there used to be gradual and measured in inches per year, but it has accelerated dramatically, hastened by thawing of the underlying layers of once-perpetually frozen soil known as permafrost. FILE PHOTO: Geologi...
Read MoreTag: landslides
A large swath of Denali National Park, one of Alaska’s premier travel destinations, has closed for the summer tourist season weeks early after heightened landslide activity from excessive thawing of a mountain slope made the park’s only access road unsafe. The National Park Service announced the closure late on Tuesday. Gradual but sustained sliding of the hillside has made travel treacherous around the halfway point of the 92-mile (148-km) access road, near a site called Pretty Rocks, the agency said. A shuttle bus passes the Pretty Rocks site in Denali National Park, Alaska, U.S., July 21, 2020. REUTERS/Yereth Rosen The “changing climate is driving frozen ground to thaw,” Denali park superintendent Don Striker said in a statement, which described the pace of land movement at Pr...
Read MoreLike most hill townships, Mussoorie, the popular hill station in Uttarakhand, has witnessed several landslides, probably resulting from an increased spate of developmental activities. The increased disaster hazard has led scientists to map the landslide susceptibility of Mussoorie and surrounding areas, showing that 15 percent of the region is highly susceptible to landslides. Landslide is a normal geomorphic process that becomes hazardous when interfering with any development activity. It has been noted that more than 400 causalities occur in the Himalayan region every year due to this phenomenon. The frequency and magnitude of the landslides increase every year, particularly in the hilly townships. This demands the large scale landslide susceptibility, hazard, risk, and vulnerabi...
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