Barry glacier June 2019
While kayaking in Barry Arm fjord in June 2019, Valisa Higman, an artist-in-residence at Alaska's Chugach National Forest, noticed some
odd fractures on a cliff overlooking the fjord. Curious if the slope might be in the process of collapsing, she emailed photos (see one of them below) to her brother, Bretwood Higman. "Hig" is a geologist with Ground Truth Alaska, and he has studied landslides and tsunami deposits for decades.
He was soon inspecting the area using Google Maps,
zooming in to the maximum extent possible and searching for signs of slippage. He saw the cracks as well, but nothing about them struck him as strong evidence of a big landslide. "But it turns out I had made a geology 101 error," he said. "I hadn't zoomed out enough, and I missed the big picture." Still, he kept Barry Arm on a list of possible landslides to investigate more someday.
A few months later, Chunli Dai offered that chance. The Ohio State researcher was working on a NASA-funded project to develop new ways to automatically detect landslides in the Arctic, and she was looking for test sites to check how well the tool was working. Her project makes use of a
high-resolution dataset called ArcticDEM and machine learning to automatically search for and flag landslides.
Comment: From giant fissures, gaping sinkholes, and epic landslides to methane deposit explosions, earth movements of all kinds appear to be on the increase:
- Sinkholes: The groundbreaking truth
- Expanding Earth? New theory on how Earth's tectonic plates may have formed
For insight into what may be driving this shift, SOTT radio reports: