These landslides, called permafrost detachment slides, occur in areas with relatively thin permafrost and seem to be a long-term impact of wildfire in these environments, according to a paper published Sept. 23 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Such slides have not been observed in the region before and may be unprecedented over the past 10,000 years or more, said study leader Joseph Young, who completed the work as part of his doctoral degree at the University of Alberta.
Young and his colleagues were doing field observations in Canada's Northwest Territories when they noticed large landslide scars in valleys that have long hosted stable permafrost, which is sediment that remains frozen year-round. They began using satellite imagery to map the changes and also conducted fieldwork, which revealed that the slides weren't standard melting permafrost.
Some of these blocks were 33 feet (10 meters) tall, the height of a two-story house. The researchers ran an electrical current through the ground to determine the depth of the permafrost on the slopes.
The researchers then used the data they'd collected to build a model of how these icy slides occurred. The permafrost in this area has been warming by about 0.54 degrees Fahrenheit (0.3 degrees Celsius) per decade since 1980, when monitoring began, and there were also severe wildfires nearby in 1995.
"We had a fire in '95 and then 20 years later, we start to get a lot of these widespread disturbances," Young said.
Related storiesThe two large slides the researchers studied are among more than 150 in the area, Young said. The others are smaller, but they still typically move over 35 million cubic feet (1 million cubic meters) of land apiece. Canada's Northwest Territories are remote, so the permafrost detachment slides have yet to damage any infrastructure. But the two in the study did dam rivers, creating brand-new lakes and rapidly dumping sediment into the waterways downstream, Young said.
"This is almost a potential glimpse into the future of what we might be able to expect in these areas with changing forest fire dynamics," he said.
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