16 March 2012
Additional resources (photos and videos) for the rockfall at the White Cliffs of Dover
Posted by Dave Petley
Further to my post yesterday about the rockfall at Dover last week, there are two excellent resources online about this event. First, the Daily Mail has a really wonderful gallery of images, from which the one below is taken:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2114912/White-Cliffs-Dover-Thousands-tons-chalk-crash-sea-large-section-collapses.html
Second, Youtube has a video of the site:
Note the huge block that is detaching to the right (looking at the cliff) of the block that has fallen. Another landslide is inevitable at some point reasonably soon. Of course the reason that these cliff remain so white is that the faces are renewed regularly by large rockfalls.
Dave Petley is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hull in the United Kingdom. His blog provides commentary and analysis of landslide events occurring worldwide, including the landslides themselves, latest research, and conferences and meetings.
The interesting thing about the block to the right, is that it’s visible on Google Earth going back several years, in contrast to the area that collapsed in this week’s landslide. http://g.co/maps/u6tx6
A factoid based on a very rough estimate by someone with too much time on his hands: if all 10,000 tonnes of chalk eventually gets washed away, it’ll neutralise a year’s worth of anthropogenic ocean acidification in the English Channel from the Strait of Dover down as far as Portland Bill/Cape Hague.