By Chris Baraniuk
Publication Date: 2026-03-24 10:00:00
Suddenly and unexpectedly, landslides and avalanches claim thousands of lives every year and cause billions of dollars in damage. What if we could see them coming?
There are tell-tale signs that something is wrong around the village of Kimtang in central Nepal. There are cracks in the concrete steps of the houses, trees growing at strange angles – evidence of the ground shifting beneath the villagers’ feet. The question is: How much is the ground moving?
“This is not good,” says Antoinette Tordesillas, a mathematician at the University of Melbourne, as she shows me a top view of Kimtang over Zoom. A large red spot can be seen in the image, which is not just any old satellite image, but a colored map created by an artificial intelligence (AI) system.
The AI has identified a large, unstable area directly below the village and colored it bright red amidst the dark blue remainder of the hill. This means that the village is located directly in a location where there is a high risk of a potentially devastating disaster…