Abbotsford Disaster, Dunedin, 1979 Photo: (Archives New Zealand CC BY 2.0)
About 66 million people – or about one percent of the world's population – currently work or live in places where there is a high risk of a landslide.
But knowing where and when a landslide will occur is currently more of an art than a science.
Now a team at Victoria University of Wellington hopes that a network of cheap GPS sensors could help us make accurate slip predictions at a fraction of the cost of a surveyor taking regular measurements with their instruments.
Nick Willis, Viclink's Commercialisation Manager, Engineering, shows us the system in operation near Wellington.
