The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
For anyone monitoring global landslides, Ramban District in Jammu and Kashmir, India is a familiar name. Located in a highly tectonically active area of the Himalayas, with a monsoonal climate , steep topography and weak geology, landslides are a common occurrence in this zone. The comparatively high population density means that they often cause economic damage and, sadly, loss of life.
On 25 April 2024, a large failure occurred at Pernote, near to Ramban itself. This landslide is the subject of a new paper in the journal Landslides (Mir et al. 2025), which seeks to provide a description of the event and to account for its occurrence. It’s a nice contribution.
The Google Earth image belowshows the site of the failure – the location is [33.24247, 75.20793]. The authors correctly identify that this is an old landslide complex that extends a considerable distance up the slope. They demonstrate that the landslide was showing signs of distress prior to April 2024, including the development of tension cracks. Little action was taken to try to head off the major failure, which then destroyed the road and damaged 55 houses. About 200 people had to be relocated at the time of the failure, which was triggered by prolonged heavy rainfall.
The area immediately below the road is most obviously unstable in this image, but the ancient landslide extends much further upslope than this. This geomorohological setting is common in the area; many of the slopes are characterised by large, ancient landslides – indeed, you may be able to see at least two other examples in the image above.
The image below is a Planet image dated 25 April 2024, the day of the failure, draped onto the Google Earth DEM. The landslide occurred in the evening, whist this image was captured earlier in the day:-
And here is a Planet image from 1 May 2024, after the landslide, showing the aftermath:-
And below is a slider to allow the two images to be compared:-
As the image above shows, once a failure of this type has developed it becomes very difficult and expensive to manage and mitigate the failure. There is a real risk that the landslide will now expand over time, causing a great deal more damage and loss.
The Pernote landslide case study by Mir et al. (2025) emphasises the need to ensure that sites such as this are identified as movement starts to develop (or ideally, before), and that action is taken to try to prevent a major event. Dealing with such events after the event is so very much more difficult.
References
Mir, R.A., Aziz, K., Singh, S. et al. 2025. Pre- and post-landslide phenomena in Pernote area, Ramban District, Jammu and Kashmir, India: implications for early warning, mitigation, and preparedness. Landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-025-02469-z
Planet Team. 2025. Planet Application Program Interface: In Space for Life on Earth. San Francisco, CA. https://www.planet.com/