Scary, but slow-moving, Russian avalanche caught on camera
Digital Reporter
Saturday, April 18, 2015, 8:45 AM - The guy who shot the video above seems remarkably calm as a giant cascade of earth devours the highway he's standing on.
Not too surprising, we suppose; As far as disasters go, this is a really slow-moving one.
The video surfaced on Youtube late last week, but the incident it depicts took place earlier in April, in a place called Zarechny in Russia.
There are many places in Russia bearing that name, but the LiveLeak upload of the video places it in Penzenskaya Oblast, in the European portion of the country:
Wherever it is, it's certainly impressive. You can hear the "crack" of those trees being either uprooted or snapped clean in two by the huge, man-sized earth wall. Oddly, if you look behind it, you can see what seems to be construction equipment, which seems to be unaffected.
The American Geophysical Union, which posted the video on its blog Friday, notes it would be just about the time the spring thaw would be getting started in that part of Russia.
There's very little information about the landslide, although what likely happened is that spring meltwater has seeped into the soil on a nearby hillside. This makes it more viscous, and likely to "flow" downhill if there's enough water and enough of the soil is saturated.
SOURCE: American Geophysical Union | LiveLeak
BONUS VIDEO: Landslide nudges building into river:
