Namibia on Tuesday launched an initiative aimed at rewarding, recognizing and supporting individuals and entities that play a pivotal role in ensuring the safety, hospitality, kindness, care and preservation of the country's tourism.

The campaign, dubbed "Tourism Heroes," was launched by the Gondwana Collection, a hub for travel and safaris in Namibia, in response to a concerning surge in criminal activities targeting international tourists.

Speaking at the launch, Namibian Minister of Environment, Forestry and Tourism Pohamba Shifeta said this reward system will assist and support the government efforts in ensuring that culprits and criminals that target tourists and tourist establishments are quickly identified, apprehended, and brought to book to face the full wrath of the law.

Gondwana Collection Namibia showed its commitment to this cause by contributing 1 million Namibian dollars (about 67,000 US dollars) through the Gondwana Care Trust.

"This great initiative is forward-looking, and we hope that it will be used to bring crime incidents against tourists to zero in Namibia," Shifeta said, welcoming the establishment of the Tourism Protection Unit by the Namibian Police.

Meanwhile, Peter Katjavivi, speaker of the National Assembly who also attended the launch, highlighted the importance of the hospitality industry as well as tourists visiting the country, noting that there is a need to make the southern African country welcoming to all tourists and make it the preferred destination for tourists to experience true hospitality in Africa.

Last week, Namibia experienced a spate of violent attacks on international tourists, which Shifeta condemned as a serious concern for the industry which contributes significantly to the country's gross domestic product.

SEATTLE — Earth weakened by previous landslides and soils behaving like water were responsible for the unusual size of a deadly 2014 landslide, two scientists reported October 24 at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting. Understanding why this landslide was so mobile could help geologists better map the hazards that could lead to others like it and prevent future loss of life.

In March 2014, following more than a month of heavy rainfall, a wall of mud suddenly rushed down a hillside near Oso, Wash., engulfing houses and trees before spilling into the Stillaguamish River valley (SN: 4/19/14, p. 32). The debris flow killed 43 people and destroyed dozens of homes. The valley had seen landslides before, most recently in 2006. But the “run-out” — the size of the debris flow — of the Oso landslide was uncommonly large, spreading a fan of mud and debris across 1.4 kilometers.

To unravel the sequence of events leading to the landslide, Brian Collins and Mark Reid, both with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., first mapped the debris that made up the landslide, including large still-intact blocks of hillside called hummocks, glacial sediments and fallen trees. The researchers then used those maps to track where the different parts of the debris had originated and where they ended up. From that, the duo determined that sediments weakened and previously mobilized by the 2006 landslide failed first, followed by sediments that had failed in a prehistoric landslide and finally by intact sediments.

Once it began to flow, the landslide didn’t sweep smoothly down the hill, the researchers determined. Instead, segments collided into one another and then stretched apart — extending and contracting earthwormlike — as more and more of the slope fell and transferred its momentum to the landslide. The sudden piling-on of mass also caused the soils beneath the hummocks and larger debris to weaken and become “liquefied,” or behave like water. And those liquefied soils then helped raft the hummocks and trees much farther out into the valley.