Super-Sauze (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France) landslide origins and evolution

Located in the Ubaye Valley, on the heights of an eponymous ski station, the Super-Sau ze landslide is an active ground movement on the ”Chapeau de Gendarme” north slope (2682m). The analysis of its movement, widely instrumented nowadays, gives us the possibility to precisely describe this geomorphological process : with a mean speed between 5 and 10 meters per year, this landslide belongs to the “slow slides” family. Nevertheless, even if its movement has a small daily amplitude (1 to 2 cm per day), it has been up to 15 times faster less than 50 years ago… This landslide gravity dynamic is given as a very steep slope which is vigorously drained by water when it is raining. Those information leads scientists to consider this landslide as a metastable phenomenon, that is to say which the balance is compromised in the case of a perturbation or the crossing of a stress threshold...