{"id":22629,"date":"2017-03-24T08:00:58","date_gmt":"2017-03-24T08:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=22629"},"modified":"2017-03-24T08:01:34","modified_gmt":"2017-03-24T08:01:34","slug":"mitchell-creek-landslide-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2017\/03\/24\/mitchell-creek-landslide-1\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mitchell Creek landslide in British Columbia, Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Mitchell Creek landslide in British Columbia, Canada<\/h5>\n

The Mitchell Creek landslide is a very large, complex failure that has developed in response to the retreat of the Mitchell Valley Glacier in British Columbia, Canada.\u00a0 In a paper just published in the journal Landslides<\/em>, Clayton et al.<\/em> (2017)<\/a> describe how this very complex and large (more than 1 km wide and 1 km long) landslide started to develop sometime between 1956 and 1972 as the slope was debuttressed due to the loss of ice at the toe.\u00a0 Since then parts of the landslide have moved by 40 metres or more.<\/p>\n

The Google Earth image below, collected in 2010, shows the landslide.\u00a0 The location is 56.525, -130.233 if you want to take a look.\u00a0 Note I have had to change the contrast in the image to make it easier to see.\u00a0 The Mitchell Glacier is at the toe of the slide, whilst tension cracks are clearly evident on the slope behind.:-<\/p>\n

\"Mitchell

Google Earth image of the Mitchell Creek landslide in BC<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

In many ways though this landslide is easier to understand from the side, as this Google Earth image shows:<\/p>\n

\"Mitchell

Google Earth image of the Mitchell Creek landslide, annotated with the major zones identified by Clayton et al.<\/em> (2017)<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

The key to this landslide has been the retreat of the Mitchell Glacier, which can be seen in the image above.\u00a0 As the ice has melted the slope has been debuttressed – a well-known mechanism – and has started to deform.\u00a0 Clayton et al.<\/em> (2017)<\/a> have identified three major zones in the landslide – at the rear a sliding zone (in the images above the huge tension cracks are clearly visible), which is moving at about 20 cm per year on average.\u00a0 At the front there is a zone of toppling, which is moving much faster – about 80 cm per year.\u00a0 Between the two is a transition zone, in which movement rates are about 33 cm per year and in which the blocks are showing evidence of subsidence.\u00a0 Clayton et al.<\/em> (2017)<\/a> have used this to generate a really nice conceptual model of the landslide, below, which demonstrates in a very straightforward way the manner in which this landslide is developing:<\/p>\n

\"Mitchell

Simple conceptual model of the Mitchell Creek landslide, from Clayton et al.<\/em> (2017)<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

If you compare this model with the Google Earth images above then the behaviour of the landslide becomes clear.\u00a0 It will be fascinating to see how this behaves in the next few years.<\/p>\n

Reference<\/h5>\n

Clayton, A., Stead, D., Kinakin, D. et al.<\/em> 2017.\u00a0 Engineering geomorphological interpretation of the Mitchell Creek Landslide, British Columbia, Canada.<\/a> Landslides<\/em> doi:10.1007\/s10346-017-0811-1<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a paper just published, Clayton et al. (2017) describe the Mitchell Creek landslide, a very large rockslide in Canada triggered by glacial debuttressing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":22654,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[544],"tags":[4,3090,469,619,959,725,192,17],"class_list":["post-22629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review-of-a-paper","tag-canada","tag-debuttressing","tag-featured","tag-glacier","tag-landslide-report","tag-north-america","tag-paper","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22629","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=22629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}