A team of researchers at Simon Fraser University have returned to the Big Bar site, as part of a project to prevent future extinction-level events for Salmon.
Back in 2018, a landslide blocked the Frasier River, at the Big Bar site, blocking the river channel to Salmon trying to spawn to their grounds at the Upper Fraser Basin.
SFU Professor of the School of Environmental Science and Geography Jeremy Venditti explains the work being done at the Big Bar Site.
“Our investigation started off as an investigation on what happened at Big Bar and how Big Bar has been affecting Fraser Salmon, but it has gradually expanded to how it has affected a number of sites in the Fraser Canyon looking for landslides, trying to figure out where they may occur in the future.”
He says what triggered the Big Bar landslide in 2018 was interesting for them.
“We wrote a paper, an academic paper in 2014 where we predicted if events like big bar should happen in rivers, largely because the way the water flows through the canyon like in big bar, it dries water and sediment into the side of the canyon walls and it tends to erode them and then whatever is on top, tends to erode them and then it falls down into the river.”
As part of their research at the site, Venditti says they use an instrument called a lightbar to measures the typography of the land surface.
“So what we are doing is we are looking for features on the earths surface that indicate that there have been landslides in the past, our ultimate goal is to find places where landslides are occurring in the Frasier Basin and then also try to attach an age to them.”
By attaching an age to the rock, Venditti says it allows them to figure out a few different things.
“First of all where landslides are happening, second how big they are because we can measure the size of a landslide from our lightbar and then we can also measure the age so that can allow us to figure out how often we might expect landslides of a particular size to happen in the Fraser Basin.”
He says their ultimate goal is to figure out a mathematical model to figure out when the next landslide might be, like the landslide that occurred at the Big Bar site.
