A three-week trip will be undertaken to visit the sites of three major landslides occurred in Colombia (November, 1985), in Peru (March, 1987), and in Ecuador (March, 1987). The purpose of this visit is to meet with national experts in each country and with their help identify three field trip sites in regions underlain by residual and pyroclastic soils where catastrophic landslides have taken place. Data will be gathered at these sites, and the bases will be laid for cooperative research to study these large mass movements using the latest geological and geomechanical methods of detection and analysis. From this initial activity studies on the stabililty of natural slopes potentially unstable and international cooperation for developing methods for the mitigation of landslide damage will emerge.
