Expert on landslides after Nepalese earthquake

The following University of Victoria expert is available to comment on his discovery of a major new landslide threat in the popular trekking region of Annapurna in Nepal following the 7.8 magnitude earthquake on April 25.

Dan Shugar (Hakai Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. of Geography) is a UVic geoscientist who is helping analyze NASA and DigitalGlobe satellite imagery to provide crucial data to Nepalese officials in support of mitigation and emergency recovery efforts in Nepal. He is leading the analysis within the Annapurna region and, this past weekend, he and his team of two UVic grad students and one UVic staff member discovered a series of landslides, one of which had dammed the Marsyangdi River, creating a potentially deadly lake threatening the village of Lower Pisang. “We don’t know when it might fail, but this could be a serious threat to Lower Pisang and villages downstream,” he says. Dr. Shugar is part of an international 35-member volunteer group launched soon after the earthquake, whose efforts have now been incorporated into the NASA-USGS (US Geological Survey) Interagency Earthquake Response Team. Dr. Shugar is available for media interviews and can be reached by email and phone. (Office: 250-472-5930 or dshugar@uvic.ca)

A satellite map of the region can be found on the UVic website: http://bit.ly/1dQqQGf.

A link to the NASA information page is available here: http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/hazardous-landslide-dammed-lake-pisang-annapurna-region-nepal.

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