Marnie Chesterton

Voin liittää sitä oikeastaan seuraavaksi, että se on yhdessä radarissa. Ei todellakaan, kuten David sanoi. Kaikki, mitä voin löytää yhdessä, on hienoa ja yllättävää, joten en edes yrittäisi. Olin Nepalissa viime viikolla ja olin menossa tekemään tarinaa alkuperäisestä huomioistuimesta, joka huomioi ihmisiä lanslaitteista. Okei.

And landslides are pretty common in the pool, right? Yes, yes, absolutely. Is that because of steep terrain and heavy rains? That's exactly it, Marni. Every year somewhere between 40 to 200 lives are lost because of landslides. And there's also cattle and

Structures, infrastructure. When I was traveling, I saw so many roads that had been reinforced because there had been a landslide. Or there were places where it was evident that there had been a landslide and it was still not really cleaned up from last year's monsoon. And in 2015 was the big one that everybody talks about. It was caused by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake and 250 people died. And it's a very, very big deal. Landslides are...

very important all over the world, but in Nepal an early warning system could potentially save a lot of lives. And when you say early, how early are you talking? So I don't have that answer in hours, but in terms of notice, it's been enough that in many cases people could even relocate their larger livestock and move

sekä ihmisiä, saavutettavissa turvallisuudessa. Tribhuvan yliopistossa Katmanduissa tutkijat aloittivat katsomaan sitä suoraan 2015-luvun jälkeen. Vuonna 2018 he saavuttiin erittäin paikallinen sopimus järjestelmään, joka käytetään muun muassa.

They basically melded together a bunch of different instruments and sensors, including an extensometer, which is something that records displacement and movement of the ground, plus a rainfall gauge and a vibration sensor and a soil moisture sensor and GPS. All of these together put their inputs into a microcontroller, which acts like the system's brain, and then it's all wired to a threshold, which when it's crossed,

Sets off some sort of alarm? Exactly, a loud siren goes off. And in some places an SMS appears on your phone. But there are three problems. One, big one, is that the sirens are not being maintained because funds have been diverted to other projects that are even more urgent.

There is some early warning, but often it's not early enough. Things can change in a minute if there's a cloudburst. Even more concerning, there's new research published by the University of Melbourne scientists in Australia, who found that the safe zones where people are evacuated to are sometimes on even more dangerous fault lines or terrain than the places that they are monitoring and need to be evacuated.

And how did they figure that out? By accident, actually. So the University of Melbourne researchers got access to data from a European satellite. And this one bounces radar off the ground and it can map the terrain in really fine detail.

Satelliitti, jota kutsutaan Sentinel-1, tuli juuri oikein läpi Nepalin tämän alueen, ja kuvaukset, joita se mappi, päätyivät lead-scientistin, matematikko Antoinette Tordesilas, ja hän pystyi tekemään AI-kysymyksiä tätä dataa. Ja sitten...

She was able to tell the mayor the bad news, which is that the place everybody was being evacuated to, the designated safe spot, was actually not safe at all. But there was also good news, because with this mapping, she was able to tell them that the high school was actually safe and they could change the place that people would be relocated to.

She was able to do this because they looked at the physics of how the slopes fail along with all this amazing satellite data. What now? Right now the Australian team is collaborating with the same Nepal team that had deployed the earlier warning system with local modifications for the terrain. They're using all of the on-ground sensors and

sekä tätä uutta tietoa satelliitteista, joita he ylittävät, jotta voivat tehdä arviointia siitä, kuinka paljon rikkoja muuttuu, esimerkiksi rikkoja. Sitten pilottaminen loppuu, kun monsoonit ovat loppuneet, ja he voivat löytää tietoa siitä, kuinka monta elämää he on saavuttaneet.

The previous system has actually saved more than 400 lives since it was deployed, because they've been able to move people out of what were then really massive landslides. So they're hoping that during the monsoon this year, they'll be able to do even better. Thank you, Chavi, for a story that definitely was under the radar, Nepal's landslide early warning system. Good to hear that it's saved some lives already.

Kiitos, että katsoitte.

Or you can write to us. I love a postcard. And fun inside science fact. Did you know that if you want to get hold of David Attenborough, you can't email him. You have to send him an actual mailed letter. And I have multiple colleagues who were like, what do we do? What do we do? Panic, panic. How do we write a letter? And they've got responses from him and they absolutely treasure their responses.

That totally clocks. Yeah, spreading joy. If that appeal to the written words has moved you to write to us, our address is Unexpected Elements, BBC World Service, Cardiff, CF104GA in the UK.

Of course, we love reading all of your emails and messages on this program. And last week we asked if you had any stories or anecdotes about Sir David. And we also reached out to some people in the extensive BBC network for their stories. To start things off, we have a voice note from Helen Scales, a marine biologist, broadcaster and author.

A few years ago I wrote a book about the Royal Institution Christmas lectures. In particular the ones about the natural world. So of course I had to include the 1973 lectures by David Attenborough. And his series was about the language of animals. So I watched back his lectures, the film, I wrote the book, and I got in touch with David to see if he might be so kind as to write an introduction. And I was so thrilled when he said he would. In fact the note that he wrote for me is something of a confession.

Hän sanoi, että hän yritti poistaa tutkimuksen. Hän kirjoitti BBCin, että hän halusi poistaa kontraktaansa. BBC perusti hänet tämän tutkimuksen. Jos katsoisit niitä, näet, että ne ovat todella hauskoja. Koneet eivät aina tehdä sitä, mitä hän toivoo. Koneet eivät vastaa äidin ääniin. Pukupiini ei tullut poistumaan, eikä hänellä tullut vananeita. Minun suositukseni on, kun David saapuu rintalaisella limalla.