A fascinating and huge Russian earthflow [video] | Hacker News Reader

A fascinating and huge Russian earthflow [video]

blogs.agu.org

77 pointsmh-cx14 comments

The guy doing the filming talks on the phone and says that "road to Talda" is being blocked by landslide. There is Bol'shaya Talda and Malaya Talda not too far from Novokuznetsk Kemerovskaya obl. That's in Siberia and does have a good amount of mining there.

That said, it could be just seasonal melting gone out of control.

There appears to be some sort of activity happening on the mountain in the background during certain shots ... I couldn't decide whether it was mining or timbering.

Watching those high-tension lines (and complete towers) being pulled along by the earth and snow would make me get out of the way much faster!

This is a shaky handheld video, postprocessed using very aggressive content-morphing stabilization measures that have recently become available (like Adobe Premiere's Warp Stabilizer). These are normally not a huge issue, but in this particular case, the actual background of the scene is moving all around and deforming in various ways. Figuring out how much of the effect is cinematic and how much is real is visually confusing.

Spectacular result, even so.

That is a pretty amazing video. It reminded me of videos of lava flows in Hawaii (but without the glow and sparks).

Interesting that the high tension power lines were dragged along so the section has been stable prior long enough for those lines to be erected.

The other thing that I found fascinating is where and what is the new material that is displacing this material? You effectively have a horizontal flow at the camera position but what is pushing it from the back to move? The side of the hill coming down? Gases coming up? And while the "article" suggested snow melt I could see that lubricating the material but pushing it?

Glad I'm not responsible for keeping that road open, that seems like its going to be closed for a few weeks while they dig it out.

I happened to be listening to Electric Wizard while I watched this, would recommend!

A consequence of climate change induced permafrost melt? The post suggests it might be more a result of mining activity combined with typical thawing behaviour for the area?

> There is no information about the landslide, except that it occurred on 1st April 2015 at Zarechnyi.

> Given that this would be the thawing season, the conditions would be right for this type of landslide.

I wouldn't jump to those questions.

Dont jump to conclusions, of course. But dont jump to questions? A strange turn of phrase. Siberia is certainly warming. There is a huge amount of evidence for this. http://www.climatehotmap.org/global-warming-locations/northe... Questioning whether this warming is causing more examples and more extreme examples of this sort of phenomenon is certainly reasonable. (Maybe its not, I dont know, but to a rational person it begs the question) There is already growing evidence for warming in Siberia causing the release of methane resulting in craters. http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/news/n0076-how-gl...

In Soviet Russia, the earth moves you!

pretty sure that "earth moves you" is not a localized phenomenon

> There is no information about the landslide, except that it occurred on 1st April 2015 at Zarechnyi.

Doesn't look very real. I think it's a fake.

At 44 seconds in, there's a very strange linear camera bounce. I don't know how that can happen naturally. There's something fishy about this video.

I think it is software stabilized

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