{"id":16441,"date":"2015-10-13T07:13:04","date_gmt":"2015-10-13T07:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=16441"},"modified":"2015-10-13T07:13:04","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T07:13:04","slug":"the-deep-lake-landslide-in-montana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2015\/10\/13\/the-deep-lake-landslide-in-montana\/","title":{"rendered":"The Deep Lake landslide in Montana"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Deep Lake landslide<\/h5>\n

The KPAX website has an interesting story<\/a> this morning about the Deep Lake landslide in the Beartooth Mountains<\/a> of Montana, USA:<\/p>\n

The feature is an immense heap of rock, the result of a gigantic rockslide that formed a natural dam and created Deep Lake, one of the largest bodies of water in the Beartooths…Deep Lake is remote, but it is hardly unknown and it\u2019s no secret that it was formed by a rockslide. Apparently, however, no one before Blevins\u2014in consultation with Paul Burley, a geologist and civil engineer\u2014attempted to estimate the total volume of the Deep Lake Rockslide…The slide is 1,100 feet (335 metres) deep at its apex and contains nearly 500 million cubic yards (383 million cubic metres), or about 1 billion tons, of material. By comparison, the Hebgen Lake Slide along the Madison River, which was triggered by an earthquake in 1959 and created Quake Lake, is estimated at just 43 million cubic yards. The Gros Ventre Slide, 30 miles east of Jackson, Wyo., is estimated at 50 million cubic yards.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt does show that it\u2019s huge,\u201d Blevins said of their research into the Deep Lake Slide. \u201cIt\u2019s just mind-blowing. We concluded that it\u2019s probably the biggest in North America.\u201d\u00a0 The second-largest slide in North America, Blevins said, is the Hope Slide in British Columbia. It comes in at 61.5 million cubic yards.\u00a0 The Deep Lake Slide, which is on the southern end of the Beartooth Plateau in Park County, Wyo., is thought to have occurred 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, at the end of the period of glaciation known as the Pinedale era. The slide dammed up Littlerock Creek, which gradually pooled to form Deep Lake, which is 1.6 miles (2.6 km) long and estimated to be about 600 feet deep (183 m). There is no surface drainage; excess water percolates through the slide, emerging downhill as large springs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Deep<\/a>

Deep Lake landslide – image from KPAX and Auzie Blevins<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

This is the Google Earth image of the Deep Lake site:<\/p>\n

\"Deep<\/a>

Deep lake landslide via Google Earth<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

The landslide is quite interesting from a morphological perspective – it is perhaps surprisingly large for terrain of this type for example.\u00a0 This appears to be the main source of the landslide and the deposit, again from Google Earth:<\/p>\n

\"Deep<\/a>

Deep lake landslide via Google Earth<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

But note that other areas, on both sides of the valley, have undoubtedly contributed volume to this landslide deposit.<\/p>\n

The article argues that this landslide deserves more detailed study.\u00a0 Whilst the information about the largest landslides in North America is not correct – I looked at this issue in a post about the Bingham Canyon landslide in Utah two years ago<\/a> – I can only agree that this landslide is worthy of a proper investigation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Deep Lake landslide in Montana is a giant prehistoric rockslide that has created a large lake in the Beartooth Mountains<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":16444,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[469,15,638,306,48],"class_list":["post-16441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-report","tag-featured","tag-landslide-dam","tag-montana","tag-rock-avalanche","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}