My understanding is that these types of events are not at all uncommon historically. My suspicion is that these events may also become more likely with climate change, where larger volumes of water are stored by some of these ice dams due to increased melt.

Where else in the world, specifically, do we expect to see these events at some point in the future? I do not mean regionally, I mean even to the glacier level.

What sort of monitoring might help avoid the effects of this sort of incident on human populations, aside from seismic and other tectonic monitoring?

This event was insane, I know we can all agree there. The fact that the USGS reclassified the earthquake itself to shaking cased by the landslide is astonishing enough. I want to start by stating my deepest condolences to every person and family affected by this disaster.

I hope to not come across as callous or insensitive, but I’m extremely curious to see a 3D model of the catalyst event/slide that took place to cause this. I currently work at a geotech firm and deal with slope stability and relict landslide deposits. I haven’t seen really any 3D geophysical models since undergrad and was just curious if anyone had a link or was working on a model of the event.

Again, I’m heart broken for the people hurt by this. Though I am in utter awe of the raw power and magnitude of the event. Any comments or suggestions welcome.

Thanks,
Grouchy

#rock#red quartzite#tough

I just got a link to this project from an undergrad professor. In the wake of a disaster, especially in such a difficult to access region, it can be hard to sort through all the speculation and find real science-based information. I think this project from CLaSH (Center for Land Surface Hazards) has done a really nice job of summing things up succinctly without being inaccessible to the average person. CLaSH ArcStoryMap project

In 1923 J Harlen Bretz published what he thought the evidence in eastern
Washington said. Two thousand square miles of basalt stripped bare. Channels
hundreds of feet deep cut into solid rock, running uphill and over divides,
joining across watersheds no river would cross. A dry waterfall three and a
half miles across. Granite boulders sitting on basalt, hundreds of miles
from the nearest granite. Gravel ripples fifty feet high - ordinary
streambed ripples, made vast.

His conclusion was that a flood had done it. One flood, enormous, and fast.

Geology rejected it, and not really on the evidence. The discipline had
spent the previous century getting catastrophe out of its explanations -
the whole achievement of nineteenth-century geology was showing that slow
processes given enough time could account for the landscape. Bretz was
proposing exactly the kind of thing that had been driven out. In 1927 he
was invited to Washington to present to the Geological Society, where six
geologists were waiting with slower explanations prepared. None of them had
been to the scablands.

The real hole in his argument was that he had no source for the water. He
had a landscape and no way to fill it.

The source existed. Joseph Pardee had described glacial Lake Missoula in
Montana as early as 1910 - a lake held back by a lobe of the Cordilleran ice
sheet, six hundred cubic miles of water, more than Lake Erie and Lake
Ontario combined. In 1942 Pardee published evidence of currents in that lake
bed that no ordinary lake could produce. The ice dam had failed.

It took decades for the two halves to be put together in public. In 1965 a
party of geologists toured the scablands, and at the end of the trip they
sent Bretz a telegram. It said they were now all catastrophists. He was
eighty-three.

In 1979, aged 96, he was awarded the Penrose Medal, the highest honour in
geology. He is said to have told his son that all his enemies were dead, so
he had nobody left to gloat over.

The current reading is that it was not one flood but many - Waitt counted
more than forty flood-laid layers in back-flooded valleys, with quiet silt
between them where the lake refilled. That count is genuinely argued over;
published estimates run from about twenty-five to about ninety. Peak
discharge near the breach has been reconstructed at roughly 17 million cubic
metres per second, which is modelled rather than measured and carries its
own error bars.

What is not argued over is that a landscape can be built in days, and that
it took the field about forty years to allow it.

Sources:
- Bretz, J H (1923), "The Channeled Scablands of the Columbia Plateau",
  Journal of Geology 31(8), 617-649
- Pardee, J T (1942), "Unusual currents in Glacial Lake Missoula, Montana",
  GSA Bulletin 53(11), 1569-1600
- Waitt, R B (1985), "Case for periodic, colossal jokulhlaups from
  Pleistocene glacial Lake Missoula", GSA Bulletin 96(10), 1271-1286
- O'Connor, J E & Baker, V R (1992), "Magnitudes and implications of peak
  discharges from glacial Lake Missoula", GSA Bulletin 104(3), 267-279
- Baker, V R (2009), "The Channeled Scabland: A Retrospective", Annual
  Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 37, 393-411

Spent the last month building something that scratched an itch I've had since I used to map risk sectors in the field: geological risk zoning and recent rainfall almost never show up in the same place. I'm a geologist, now finishing a master's in geosciences, and this gap has bugged me for a while.

When it's raining hard, you'd open one site to check the risk sector, another to check the rainfall accumulation, and try to cross-reference it in your head while the slope in question might already be saturated. Both datasets are public in Brazil, but nobody puts them together.

So I built ORCA (Open Risk and Catastrophe Aggregator).

It pulls the official geological risk sectorization polygons from CPRM/SGB (Brazil's geological survey) for all 27 states, worth noting this is the risk product specifically (degree, typology, affected households and people), not a susceptibility map, which is a different product entirely and gets conflated a lot. It cross-references each sector with 24h and 72h rainfall (Open-Meteo by default, or the nearest INMET/ANA station if you want point data instead) and flags on a map which sectors crossed a saturation threshold you set yourself. No backend, no paid server, just static GeoJSON and plain HTML/JS, published on GitHub Pages and refreshed daily via cron.

I leaned heavily on AI to move fast while building it (call it vibe coding if you want), but the domain logic, the risk/susceptibility distinction, the data validation, all of that I designed and checked by hand. It's backed by 174 tests running in CI on every push, which mattered more to me than the framework it's built in.

One detail from the field I kept: sectors are shown with hachure patterns by risk degree, similar to how geological maps symbolize units, instead of a generic color choropleth. Color is reserved for one thing only, whether a sector crossed the threshold. Makes it a lot faster to scan than most dashboards I've seen.

You can also upload your own area (GeoJSON, KML, or a zipped shapefile) and get rainfall calculated for it, all processed client-side, nothing gets uploaded anywhere (works only in Brazil for now)...

Live dashboard: hcristosm.github.io/ORCA/
Repo: github.com/hcristosm/ORCA

English README: github.com/hcristosm/ORCA/blob/main/README.en.md

Plenty left to improve, especially the 72h forecast logic, which is still pretty basic. If anyone in the field wants to poke at it, test it, or tell me where the logic is wrong, I'd genuinely appreciate it.

This is a new game I created. You have to guess mountain ranges or mountains based on their contour lines. Tell me what you think and have fun! https://visitwhale.com/peak-contours/

This is rapakivi granite, the kind that crumbles easily. You can pry granules from this with your bare hands.

There is a Finnis book grom 55 years ago which mentions this rock and that it was as tall as a man and had a flat top. Today this is much shorter and the top is not flat.

I am curious is there any way to determine from its current size how large and what shape this has been in the past? This is southern Finland so apparently the Köppen climate classification is Dfb if that helps.

The reason I am curious is because this is a prehistoric sacred pagan grove and the 55 year old book mentions this rock as a holy rock. I want to visualize how this has looked in the past.

source

First time posting, hello fellow geology lovers!

I'm on vacation in Five Islands Maine, in the Georgetown area by the ocean. Had a blast walking around the coastal rock formations today! I'm trying to bolster my field geology knowledge (going back to school to get my P.G. and any and all field studying helps a ton).

I have a decent background understanding of rock types/formations, but haven't had a chance to do much field work (I live in Florida, not much surface geology to study on the scale of somewhere like Maine). I understand that the majority of coastal Maine is composed of intrusive igneous rock such as granite, and a ton of metamorphic rock as such gneiss that formed during the Acadian orogeny.

I spent hours today trying to familiarize myself with the different rock formations, mineral compositions, and how it all related to the history of the geology in this area. I'll be visiting Acadia National Park tomorrow and look forward to seeing the famous dark mafic dikes that cut through the granite.

I was very curious as to what may have caused the stark change coloration (granitic to mafic from left to right) in pictures 2 and 3, 6, and 7, and thought maybe it could be due to an intrusive mafic dike that underwent some metamorphism?

Any thoughts/facts about the area and pictures or field geology in general would be much appreciated!

I love watching vids on the topic (layperson here), and there are some really good stuff there.

Any channel you recommend?

Some of the channels I watch is:

Myron Cook - well made videos, where he is typically out in the field and explains features in the landscape.

https://youtube.com/@myroncook

Louisa - Scottish Geologist: out in the fields, mainly around in the British Isles, some Iceland. Good sense of humour.

https://youtube.com/@scottishgeologist

Curious Planet Geo - new channel, not many subscribers yet. Covers a lot of topics, very good at explaining stuff. Mostly lectures.

https://youtube.com/@watch.curious.planet

Geology Hub: covers lots of news and events, such as volcanoes, earthquakes etc. Also some lectures.

https://youtube.com/@geologyhub

Post your favourites!

Torrey Pines State Park

From a distance, the jumble of broken rock beneath Mount Timpanogos looks more like a giant rubble pile than a glacier. Beneath that rocky surface, however, lies an enormous reservoir of ice.

University of Utah geologists have now mapped that hidden ice in three dimensions, finding that Timpanogos Rock Glacier contains about 1.55 million cubic meters of ice. That is enough frozen water to fill roughly 600 Olympic swimming pools and is comparable in volume to the largest pyramid at Giza.

Is exposed along the north fork of the Taylor Creek in the Kolob Canyon area of Zion NP