Campbell Scientific instrumentation is helping to provide warnings of landslides at Åknes, Stranda community, where the beautiful surroundings pose a real threat to human life in the surrounding area.

The near-vertical sides of the fjord in this stunning part of the world, hide a rift that is opening up near the summit at the rate of up to 12 cm per year. The risk of landslides is very real and it is estimated that between 10 and 100 million m3 of the landscape could plunge into the fjord causing a huge wave and immense damage.

There is great concern for the villages of Hellesylt and Geiranger, which sit further along the fjord and could experience tsunami heights of up to 40 metres should a landslide occur. A number of other villages further out in the fjord system are also in the hazard zone.

Campbell Scientifics’ Norwegian representative, IT-AS, have supplied a range of instruments near the summit, to monitor conditions and rock movement. Four Campbell CR10X dataloggers have been installed by the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, monitoring for possible landslides. Three of the loggers are measuring temperature, conductivity and water level in 30 – 50 metre wells, another uses TDR (Time Domain Reflectometry) as well to measure rock movement. A fifth logger is measuring five extensiometers. A weather station installed by IT-AS provides further vital data including snow depth, wind speed, temperature, humidity and a Geonor T200 rain gauge supplies useful rainfall data.

Three of the loggers have high-speed wireless TCP/IP data-links to Hellesylt sending the data along with images from cameras at the site. All the data will be monitored in the future at a monitoring centre at Stranda, but for the time being, data are collected and stored by the Geological Survey of Norway.