thumb|Active lavaka on right, with inactive, largely infilled older lavakas to left Lavaka (), the Malagasy word for "hole", usually found on the side of a hill, is a type of erosional feature common in Madagascar. However, Lavaka have also been found in South Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Carolina, and similar landforms have been found in Brazil, the Great Plains of the United States, and Eswatini. They are most common in tropical regions between the Cancer and Capricorn latitudes, especially the Central Highlands of Madagascar, where approximately one metre thick la
thumb|Active lavaka on right, with inactive, largely infilled older lavakas to left Lavaka (), the Malagasy word for "hole", usually found on the side of a hill, is a type of erosional feature common in Madagascar. However, Lavaka have also been found in South Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Carolina, and similar landforms have been found in Brazil, the Great Plains of the United States, and Eswatini. They are most common in tropical regions between the Cancer and Capricorn latitudes, especially the Central Highlands of Madagascar, where approximately one metre thick laterites develop on steep terrains in a monsoonal climate. Lavaka form where these hard laterites overlie thick (tens of metres) saprolite, on steep (35 to 55 degree) slopes, in areas that have a hot dry season and a warm wet season.
Lavaka are not landslides. They are a type of gully, formed via groundwater sapping. They are usually shaped like a tear-drop with a steep, round headwall that narrows downhill into a shallow outlet channel.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).