Coastal landslide monitoring at Aldbrough, East Riding of Yorkshire, UK

Abstract

The paper describes results to date of a continuing monitoring study of coastal 'soft cliff' recession at the British Geological Survey's (BGS's) Coastal Landslide Observatory (CLO) on the east coast of England at Aldbrough, East Riding of Yorkshire. The cliffed site, part of the 50 km long Holderness coast, consists of glacial deposits, and is one of the most rapidly eroding coastlines in Europe. This rapid rate of erosion provides an ideal opportunity for observation and process understanding because it facilitates the collection of data over periods of time encompassing significant new landslide events at the same location. The results of two approaches are reported: first, terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) surveying (TLS); second, the installation of instrumented boreholes. The aim of the research is to combine these to investigate the role of landslides and their pre-conditioning factors and the influence of geology, geotechnics, topography and environmental factors on cliff recession. To date, an average recession rate of 1.8 m a −1 and a maximum rate of 3.4 m a −1 have been recorded for the site. The establishment of the CLO and its conceptual geological-geotechnical model are described in a related paper.

Comment on nhess-2021-16

“…In the second one (November 2019), the FG3 marker registered the largest 3D movement detected for a single campaign, moving 14.06 m in the lapse October-November 2019; also 19 of the 38 markers moved more than 30 cm in one month, reaching four of them (ARB, FF1, FG2, FG1) values equal or higher than 1 m (respectively, 1.70 m, 1.21m, 1.03 m, 1.00 m). The obtained rates, although they are measured on the slope and do not strictly correspond to the cliff retreat, are in line with those obtained by Hobbs et al (2020) on the Holderness coast. The arrows in Fig.…”

“…However, some previous works have obtained average retreat rates of 0.57 m year -1 for the period 2006-2017, reaching rates up to 1.22 and 2.19 m year -1 near the town of Luanco, in the surroundings of Peñas Cape (Domínguez-Cuesta et al, 2020a). Although these retreat values corresponds to specific areas, they are values similar to those obtained in Fisterra, Northern Spanish Atlantic coast (range 0.03 -2.78 m year -1 , Pérez-Alberti et al, 2013), much higher than the established in the central coast of Portugal (range 0.013 -0.130 m year -1 , Epifânio et al, 2013) or the Atlantic rocky coast (Gómez-Pujol et al, 2014 and references therein) and they agree with those reported in Holderness, considered the most active coast in Europe, with values of 2 m year -1 (Bird, 2008;Castedo et al, 2015;Hobbs et al, 2020).…”

“…vegetation, mainly eucalyptus, is profuse in this area, the field data and the comparison between the DSM carried out from the photogrammetric flights done by the Cárabo S3 aircraft in 2018 and 2019 have allowed to observe important changes occurred in some areas of the slope of the Tazones Lighthouse surroundings. Thus, the evolution of the cracks can be related to a primary planar landslide following S0 bedding and secondary movements such as flows, topples or rock fall, as has been observed in other areas of soft cliffs (Hobbs et al, 2020). Fig.…”

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for engineering geology applications

“…The use of UAV images for coastal landslide surveying and modeling at the British Geological Survey's "coastal landslide observatory" on the Holderness coast of Yorkshire (Hobbs et al 2020) is shown in Figs. 13 and 14.…”

The Application of Terrestrial LiDAR for Geohazard Mapping, Monitoring and Modelling in the British Geological Survey

“…The BGS Coastal Landslide Observatory, at Aldbrough, East Riding of Yorkshire, has been monitored since 2001, using a variety of GNSS, TLS, and MMS techniques [24]. The cliff faces northeast, is low (17 m) and of regular height.…”