Lapworth Lecture - When the ground moves (and we miss it)

Landslides are among the most powerful and widespread natural hazards on Earth, responsible for at least an estimated 4,000 deaths each year globally and economic losses of around 6 billion USD annually in industrialised countries. From fast-moving rock avalanches that release huge amounts of energy in seconds, to slow-moving slope instabilities that evolve over centuries, these processes can be both sudden and insidious. A major challenge in reducing risk is that we do not know where all hazardous slopes are. Unlike other hazards, such as volcanoes, for which location and presence are known, unstable terrain is often unrecognised until failure occurs.

Early deformation is typically subtle and difficult to detect, especially in remote or poorly monitored regions, yet these small changes can precede and foreshadow catastrophic collapse. At the same time, climate change is altering the environmental conditions that govern slope stability, while ever-expanding infrastructure and settlements increasingly expose people and assets to landslide risk.

In recent years, satellite radar techniques, particularly interferometric synthetic aperture radar, have transformed our ability to observe the Earth’s surface, enabling detection of millimetre-scale ground deformation over large areas. These methods have the potential to reveal previously unknown instabilities and offer a powerful way to screen vast regions for signs of slope movement.

However, satellite observations are not a complete solution. Landslides do not always deform in ways that are easily detectable from space, and the most telltale movements may be underestimated or entirely missed. This raises an important question: how reliably can we interpret what we see from orbit?

This lecture explores both the strengths and limitations of satellite-based landslide monitoring through real-world case studies. It shows how these methods are increasingly used in hazard assessment and major engineering projects, while also highlighting the challenges we still have in capturing the full complexity of slope behaviour.

The lecture is free to attend and open to everyone, and is available to watch in-person on campus or on Zoom.

About Benedetta

Dr Benedetta Dini is an Assistant Professor at the University of Birmingham and a Researcher at the University of Milan-Bicocca. She is an engineering geologist and geomorphologist whose work focuses on natural hazards, particularly landslides.

Before pursuing her PhD, she worked at the UK Met Office as a Deputy Chief Meteorologist. She later completed a PhD in Engineering Geology at ETH Zurich and held a research fellowship with the French Space Agency.

Her research uses satellite radar data to measure ground deformation, improving understanding of how and why landslides occur and enabling the identification of precursory deformation patterns. She has over ten years of experience in remote sensing, with a particular focus on developing new methods drawing on signal processing to improve landslide detection and monitoring.