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A massive landslide on the west coast of Canada has had unprecedented impacts on one of the country’s giant fjords. The slide has wiped out salmon habitat in Bute Inlet, British Columbia, but also cooled the inlet’s waters, reversing the recent and worrying warming caused by a potent marine heatwave.
The landslide is a lesson in the sometimes-surprising nature of climate change’s effects across various ecosystems, says oceanographer Jennifer Jackson of the Hakai Institute. “There could be interesting feedbacks that we haven’t considered,” says Jackson, who has been monitoring Bute Inlet’s conditions in monthly expeditions. In this case, climate change melted a glacier, which encouraged a landslide, which pushed glacial lake water into an otherwise-warming fjord. In other words, climate change first caused the inlet to warm and then cooled it.
Environmental impacts from millions of tonnes of earth and water sluicing down a valley and spilling into the ocean are just beginning to be understood, say scientists studying a massive landslide in the Bute Inlet watershed.
Climate change set the stage for the slide that occurred on the morning of Nov. 28, according to Brent Ward, a geologist at Simon Fraser University.
A retreating glacier northeast of the head of Bute Inlet left a mountain slope above Elliot Creek unstable, said Ward, who is also co-director for SFU’s Centre for Natural Hazards Research.
A section of the mountain normally secured by the glacier and located above an older slide came loose, plunging six to seven million cubic metres of rock and earth into a glacial lake at the head of the creek, Ward said.
Mon, 14 Dec 2020 21:33 UTC
Video shot from a helicopter Sunday shows a huge landslide in a remote area of B.C. north of Powell River.
Staff at 49 North Helicopters, located in Campbell River on Vancouver Island, said they heard about an unusual amount of wood floating in Bute Inlet on the weekend.
They decided to fly up the inlet, on B.C. s central coast, to the Southgate River where they filmed miles and miles of water, mud and floating debris.
Brent Ward, from the Department of Earth Sciences and a member of the Centre for National Hazards Research at Simon Fraser University, said it appears to have been a glacial lake outburst flood that occurred at Elliot Creek just east of the head of Bute Inlet.
Campbell River helicopter company footage shows massive landslide
SHARE ON: Still from 49 North Helicopters video. (49 North Helicopters, Facebook)
A Campbell River helicopter company has dramatic video footage of a devastating landslide in a remote area near Bute Inlet.
49 North Helicopters pilot Bastian Fleury says they were made aware of an unusual amount of wood floating in the inlet on B.C.’s central coast, north of Powell River.
Last Thursday they flew over the area to take a look.
The company posted on Facebook that what they found, might have been “one of the biggest landslides the west coast has had in the last few years.”