Thread: That's a big boulder

Originally Posted by thebigspendur

You know, in Norway many of the smaller cities are located at the ends of fiords. Sometimes they have massive landslides which cause tidal waves that take out entire towns killing everything in it's path. They try and monitor bad areas and have warning systems giving them a few minutes to evacuate.

There is a movie 'The Wave' about such an occurrence. Highly recommended. It's a disaster movie of course, but the science and the fact that these things are real makes the whole thing very interesting.

Originally Posted by BobH

Yea, the boreal forest is on the Canadian Shield which is rock. It comes from a rock cut that they make in the shield to run a road not some high mountain or from the top of a big canyon. Yea, the Franks Slide, where a mountain face came down due to mining was the last time I saw a boulder that size in the debris field.

Bob

The Canadian Shield? At one time it was covered with the richest topsoil in the world and along came the glaciers and transported it to the midwest of the U.S. In the process the shield was scoured right down to the bedrock. If you look around up there you can find the striations in the rock which will tell you where the glaciers came from and where they went.

Originally Posted by thebigspendur

The Canadian Shield? At one time it was covered with the richest topsoil in the world and along came the glaciers and transported it to the midwest of the U.S. In the process the shield was scoured right down to the bedrock. If you look around up there you can find the striations in the rock which will tell you where the glaciers came from and where they went.

Yea, lots of evidence of glacial activity here. Good thing when the glaciers receded they deposited enough top soil to allow the boreal forest and also leave behind huge number of lakes and rivers. Probably the best known of these lakes is the Great Lakes.

Bob

I spent much of my life in the driftless area of SE MN.

The last glaciers missed it.

An interesting thing I read and will have to research further is that the bedrock may have let the water under the glaciers through and then rid them of their lubrication to slide.....

No proof at this point but will have to look into it further.

I can't remember if Ye Olde Chip Truck in Kenora is open during the winter, but if it is their fries would at least be some consolation for having to go through town.

I've driven that stretch of highway many times and am always amazed at how clean they make the cuts. And if you compare the newer sections with the older ones just east or west of the bypass, it's pretty clear that blasting technology/techniques/skill has come along quite a bit over the last 40 or so years.

The Hope British Columbia slide in '65 had some pretty good sized rocks--

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...tion-1.5423360

I've been through there a few times and it's amazing to be able to see how full that slide filled the valley.

When Mount Saint Helens blew, there were chunks so big that by using a computer they could place them back together where they were before the blast.

Originally Posted by 32t

I spent much of my life in the driftless area of SE MN.

The last glaciers missed it.

An interesting thing I read and will have to research further is that the bedrock may have let the water under the glaciers through and then rid them of their lubrication to slide.....

No proof at this point but will have to look into it further.

If you are talking the glaciers sliding they are an unstoppable force sometimes 1000 or more feet thick. Running water is always associated with them as are the moraines they leave behind. Long Island in N.Y is where the glaciers stopped at that location. Glaciers caused the entire island to form. The Northern part of the island is rocky and the southern part is all sand.