Global Warming Is Destabilizing Mountain Slopes, Creating Landslide Risks

That was the craziest weekend I can remember us having as a community in a very long time. Fire, crazies, sirens at 4 am, drug crazy confrontations, accidents, and a suicide. Seemed like it would never end. Here is to a saner week ahead.

This is not something most of us want to hear, but it is definitely something we need to pay attention to. I happened across an article with the above title through Weather West (Daniel Swain) whom I follow. Here are a few excerpts:

”A team of scientists monitoring the Swiss peaks above Andermatt say they’ve detected some warming as deep as 300 feet into the rocks. In a few places, some giant rock slabs have moved more than 4 feet in a year, a possible warning sign of a large collapse.”

“Water is the key ingredient,” said Austrian hydrologist Thomas Thaler, who studies threats to mountain communities.

“For us it’s very important to know if climate change has an impact on rainfall, because that has the most influence on landslides and debris flows,” he said. “Climate change will increase the magnitude, not only the frequency, of these events.”

While most of this article deals with the very northernmost mountainous regions, like Norway and Iceland, Switzerland is also mentioned extensively. There are lessons for us to learn here about our landslides and how we prepare. As all of us here know, the challenge is to control the water that permeates these hills and has to come out somewhere. How and where we control this water is crucial. That will bring us back to Gray Slip later this week and more recent photos.

For the rest of this article, see: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26092018/climate-change-mountains-landslide-hazard-thawing-permafrost-rockfall-extreme-weather-glaciers-global-warming

You might even find you want to subscribe to insideclimatenews after reading this article.

 

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