Landslide Emoji

🛘 Landslide shows a cliff face shedding debris down its side: rocks, dirt, chunks of earth tumbling in mid-fall. It's a hazard pictograph, proposed under the working title Falling Debris, and it closes a real gap: Unicode has had 🌊 Water Wave, 🌋 Volcano, 🌪️ Tornado, 🔥 Fire, and ❄️ Snowflake for over a decade, but no glyph for 'the side of the mountain just came down.'

The case for 🛘, per the proposal, was quantitative: landslides kill roughly 5,200 people per year globally and cause about $20 billion in annual damage, with Asia bearing the largest share. News outlets, insurance communications, emergency alert systems, climate reporting, and hazard-mapping apps all used workaround combinations like 🏔️⬇️ or 🌧️⛰️ before 🛘 existed.

But in practice, expect this to get swallowed by politics within a month. The political sense of 'landslide' (a lopsided electoral victory where the losing side gets 'buried') is attested from 1888, with earlier uses in 1856 Ohio campaign coverage. An English metaphor that old doesn't release its hold on a new literal emoji. Expect every election night from 2026 onward to surface 🛘🗳️ in real time.

🛘 was proposed in L2/24-257 by Jennifer Daniel on July 2, 2024, under the working title 'Falling Debris.' The argument was the scale of human impact: thousands of deaths per year globally and tens of billions in damage, with no dedicated emoji despite the frequency of news and emergency-alert usage. Most workarounds were mismatched: 🌋 means active volcanism, 🌊 is water, ⛰️ is static mountain. Nothing captured the specific image of 'slope failure in motion.'

The proposal was accepted in Emoji 17.0, released September 2025, alongside other gap-fill emoji including [lighthouse] Lighthouse (draft), 🫪 Distorted Face, and several environmental hazard additions. Vendor font rollout began late 2025 and continues through 2026.

1. 2016🌪️ Tornado is added in Emoji 1.0 (via Unicode 6.0 mapping), closing another weather-hazard gap.
2. 2019Unicode formally reviews the hazard-emoji coverage and identifies slope-failure events as an obvious gap.
3. 2024Jennifer Daniel submits [L2/24-257 'Falling Debris Emoji'](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2024/24257-falling-debris-emoji.pdf) on July 2, framing the need around global annual damage and death toll.
4. 2025Emoji 17.0 ships in September with Landslide included, per [Unicode's announcement](https://blog.unicode.org/2025/07/say-hello-to-new-emoji-coming-in.html).
5. 2026Vendor rollout continues through the year. Apple iOS, Google Android, Samsung One UI, Microsoft Fluent, and Meta all ship 🛘 designs in their 2026 updates.

• •The proposal was originally titled 'Falling Debris', renamed to Landslide during the Emoji 17.0 drafting process.
• •Landslides kill roughly 5,200 people per year globally and cause about $20 billion in annual damage, per USGS figures.
• •The political 'landslide' metaphor is attested from 1888, but earlier uses appear in 1856 Ohio campaign coverage and in the 1872 Grant-Greeley race.
• •Grover Cleveland's 1884 presidential win, often cited as the 'first landslide,' was actually the narrowest margin of the era. His 1892 election was the real blowout.
• •Asia accounts for the largest share of global fatal landslides. Human activity (construction, illegal mining, hill cutting) is now a larger driver than climate in many regions.
• •The largest underwater landslide ever identified, the Storegga Slide off Norway ~8,200 years ago, triggered a tsunami that flooded what is now the UK coastline and may have permanently separated Britain from mainland Europe.
• •The 2014 Oso landslide in Washington state killed 43 people and is the deadliest single landslide in US history. It moved an estimated 18 million tons of material.
• •NASA's Global Landslide Catalog tracks landslide events worldwide using rainfall data from the GPM satellite. The service feeds climate and hazard research directly.