Just over a week ago, the village of Xinmo, in the Sichuan province of China, was completely wiped off the map by a massive landslide.

Torrential rain in the region loosened 8m cubic metres of rubble (equivalent in mass to more than 3,000 Olympic swimming pools) and, about 5.45am local time on Saturday 24 June, it thundered down the hillside, burying about 62 homes and claiming more than 120 lives. The intense rain was almost certainly the trigger, but the hillside has probably been poised to slip for decades.

Back in 1933, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake hit the region, with the epicentre just a few miles from Xinmo. The Diexi earthquake, as it is known, set off numerous landslides, some of which blocked the valley and created the lakes in the valley bottom.

The scars from some of those landslides are still visible today, along the ridge crests of the mountains in the region. “In general, earthquake shaking is most intense at the ridge crest – this is a tuning fork effect,” explains Dave Petley, a landslide expert at the University of Sheffield.

Photographs of last week’s Xinmo landslide show that it also bears the hallmarks of an earthquake-generated landslide, with the rubble emanating from high on the ridge crest of the mountain behind Xinmo, and sliding down a pre-existing steep rock slide.

“The 1933 Diexi earthquake was probably a key event in the evolution of this slope, that made it ready to fail,” explains Petley.

Somehow this landslide managed to cling on for nearly 85 years: a sobering and worrying thought for any steep and earthquake-prone regions of the world.