Comments on: Cornwall cliff collapse caught on video

By: darren

darren — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:13:18 +0000

i live in portreath, less than two miles from there !! i also run a cliff route not half a mile from there and i didnt find out about it till last night lololol good job i ran at the gym this week !!ps jack hughes is a knob !

By: Barbara

Barbara — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 21:17:53 +0000

She screams because it’s fun & exciting to express her excitement….

By: Barbara

Barbara — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:57:54 +0000

Every seaside cliff is slowly crumbling into the sea ! That’s why I can’t understand why people in CA build houses right on the cliffs.
there was a small underpinning slide at :03, then :06 and :09

By: Andy D

Andy D — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:59:22 +0000

I live in Cornwall. There are no cliff demolitions here. The collapse is genuine. There are many old abandoned tin mines all over the place and some of these cause land to collapse unexpectedly. There have been cases here where someones back garden suddenly disappears without warning down a 600 ft deep hole . Some of the cliffs are recognised as being likely to collapse and where this is the case there are usually warnings in place to deter people from walking too close. This collapse probably took a while to get going and there were probably a lot of little rock falls and smaller slides preceding it, which the people took note of and probably realising that something was building up, waited to see what it was.

By: Joseph G

Joseph G — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 23:05:50 +0000

@38 Sir Eccles: Dammit, you beat me to my tasteless joke by just… over 4 hours.
Heh.

By: Joseph G

Joseph G — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 22:53:42 +0000

You can't fool me! You can see the puffs of smoke from demolition charges. The cliff fell straight down. It was an inside job! Either that or the video is FAKE! I can tell from the pixels and from having seen many ~~photoshops~~ videos in my time.

By: Nic

Nic — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 22:16:14 +0000

This is now on the BBC News, who suggest this is about 200,000 tons. Also about the guy who filmed it.
I’m English and good Dr Phil showed me this first! I’ve since found this on YouTube, I think it happened around Sept 23.
Here’s the Beeb link (same video with a Beeb voiceover)…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15251292

By: Ross

Ross — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:51:26 +0000

This video of a landslide in Japan was popular a while back:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F31ywRvtNkY

By: Sir Eccles

Sir Eccles — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:19:53 +0000

Clearly they had charges placed in the cliff, you can just about hear someone say “pull it” in the background at around 8 seconds in. There’s no other way of explaining how it fell so fast.

By: Dave B

Dave B — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 17:10:24 +0000

Cool! This reminds me of Carl’s Cliff in John Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation.
I would like to see what the nearest seismograph picked up at the time.

By: Jack Hughes

Jack Hughes — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:01:12 +0000

Sooner the rest of Cornwall follows the better.

By: Mapnut

Mapnut — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:19:16 +0000

Poor shellfish get no respect. They must have died by the thousands.

By: Georg

Georg — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:44:27 +0000

Will the Cornish be welcome to Little Brittany when
most of its area will be down the sea?
Do the french speaking Britons love their english speaking brethren?
:=)

By: psuedonymous

psuedonymous — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:22:16 +0000

@MadSciKat
I visited Dartmouth fairly regularly until about 6-7 years ago, and the cliffside path had only been closed once (and was open the last time I visited). I think the worry is usually from rocks falling from above onto the path, rather than the path itself subsiding.

By: Armaghplanet

Armaghplanet — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 09:31:08 +0000

Controlled demolition. Obviously.

By: sophia8

sophia8 — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 08:56:27 +0000

JB of Brisbane @19: yes, there is a Cornish separatist movement – fairly small, but vocal. The region is recognised as one of the eight Celtic nations by organisations such as the International Celtic Congress and the main separatist party, Mebyon Kernow, has garnered a respectable number of votes in recent elections.

By: Messier Tidy Upper

Messier Tidy Upper — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 07:02:04 +0000

D’oh! I should checked my sources for comment (#25) more carefully. [Blushes] Though the original article on Cumbre Vieja itself seems okay,
Scrolling further down that first “enterprise mssion hyperquake” link reveals a load of Hoagland~esque woo. Mea culpa.

A few more – better links for y’all :

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3553368.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3963563.stm

via BBC world news plus this link with a rebuttal of sorts :

http://www.iberianature.com/material/megatsunami.html

noting :

The Spanish vulcanist Juan Carlos Carracedo who was first to spot the instability caused by the 1949 cracking was horrified by the sensationalism of the British researchers, stating: ‘The error is modelling a phenomenon when there are no (sic) probabilities of it happening. It is as if one makes a model of what Madrid would look like after an atom bomb explosion. What interest does it have for the general population when the probability is not determined?” Adding ‘In La Palma, there is on-going earthquake monitoring and absolutely no seismic activity has been detected… And retorting Day’s claim of geological proof of the Canaries collapsing in the past, he informs us that. ‘We are talking about a geological timescale, and the last time La Palma slipped was 560,000 years ago !”

So it seems the Cumbre Vieja thing may just be a beat-up.

By: bassmanpete

bassmanpete — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 06:55:04 +0000

Are they saying “there were people out there”? I can’t imagine there would have been or this would be bigger news, and I didn’t see anyone.

There are people out there. Look to the extreme right of screen and you can see them appear, walking towards the cliff, at 7 seconds in. It looks like they start running towards it once it collapses.

By: RwFlynn

RwFlynn — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 06:39:56 +0000

That, did not look like I expected it to look like (expected more of an iceberg-like slide). But it didn’t take much thought to realize that the water beside an iceberg is much deeper than at the shoreline, the results being a pile of dirt leaning against the remaining cliff, rather than a splash and slow sink to oblivion.

By: Messier Tidy Upper

Messier Tidy Upper — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 05:55:28 +0000

@1. Jorge Laris :

I watched a video at the Discovery Channel about what would happen if half a montain in the Canarias Islands fall to the sea. Apparently the tsunami produced would be so big that it would destroy all the Atlantic coast, including those at Mexico where I live.

See :

http://www.enterprisemission.com/hyperquake.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytdXOSW89gk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja#Future_threat

Is that Cumbre Vieja / La Palma volcano the one you were thinking of / saw maybe?

By: Messier Tidy Upper

Messier Tidy Upper — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 05:35:27 +0000

Ah, the joys of geomorphology* happening quicker than it usually does and thus being made visible. Great footage. Thanks for sharing this BA.

Landslides on Mars are common – I studied a one in the Mangala Vallis region with a lobate debris fan for a uni project.

Given the extreme temperatures I suspect that on Venus rock doesn’t “slide” so much as flow!

(Mind you, I could well be mistaken on that & am also, natch, referring to current Cytherean circumstances. Previous landslides may have occurred on the planet before Venus grew as hot as today. Wonder if any evidence of old landsldes an be found on its molten surface?

———————

* The science of how landscapes change over time.

By: podrock

podrock — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 05:23:17 +0000

@22 Shalev

Yes. Talus cones, or piles, are common on Mars. Seen on Venus, too, if I recall. Steep rock is unstable and gravity never sleeps. The general geomorphological term for falling rocks of all kinds is “Mass Wasting”. (Another entry in the lexicon of fun geologic terms.)

By: MattTheTubaGuy

MattTheTubaGuy — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 05:12:50 +0000

Reminds me of the Port Hills on the south side of Christchurch, New Zealand.
In the earthquakes that have happened in the last year, several large chunks have slipped down, causing damage, and unfortunately killing people too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcryML0hYrU

By: Shalev

Shalev — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 03:58:35 +0000

That’s awesome – and I am glad that no Cornwallians were harmed in the making of this film.

I noticed that the result of the slide is a kind of fan-shaped formation that looks like it’s mostly made from the upper layers of the surface (pre-slide). Do we see things like that on other planets (say, Mars?)

By: Jockaira

Jockaira — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 02:17:16 +0000

@15 Podrock

That’s also how a lot of really good fossils start.