Sackungen
James McCaplin, the 2013 AEG Jahns Distinguished Lecturer will present a talk Tuesday, May 7 at 4 pm in ES 100 at Western Washington University titled: The Mountains Are Falling Apart; A Spectrum of Mass Failures from Landslides through Deep-Seated Gravitational Spreading (Sackung), to "Unfolding" of Folds.
One of the benefits of living in a town with a great university geology department.
There are definite Sackungens in northwest Washington. The above image could easily be used to to describe the steep slopes above parts of the South Fork Nooksack Valley or the Samish River Valley. One of the lessons of Sackungens is not to get them confused with fault lines. These can be enormous landslides and indeed on two occasions I spent the better part of a day or two thinking I was seeing fault scarps. This paper by Varnes, Radebruch-Hall and Savage (1989) http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1496/report.pdf is a great introduction even if a bit Colorado centric.
Great lecture and thanks for spreading the good word. It's also scary when I almost understand it.
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