Advances in the understanding of cold region landslides

Session 26, on landslides in cold regions, brought together scientists from around the world with representatives from Canada, China, France, Italy, New Zealand, Pakistan, Switzerland, and Russia. Presentations could be grouped into broad categories. The overarching keynote address by Stephan Gruber (Zurich) stressed the importance of understanding permafrost dynamics in the context of a changing climate as a key to landslide hazard assessments in cold regions. Stephan stressed concepts such as heterogeneity, non-linear trajectories of change, and unexpected results with respect to mountain permafrost, and that these conspire to make hazard analysis difficult. Chinese, Swiss Italian and Russian papers discussed aspects of landslides in cold soil, whereas the remaining papers discussed aspects cryospheric landslides (mainly) in rock. A subset of these last papers dealt with rock instabilities on the Mont Blanc massif.