Soil-rich soil of Quebec is a landslide risk-there is not any vital slope
A landslide that swallowed a house and left a 300 -meter pit in the middle of a rural road in Central Quebec on Wednesday, wondering how it could happen.
Usually when people think about landslides, they think of a slope with rocks and debris, not a flat expansion of the land falling down.
As this happens, however, due to the topography of the province and its soil, on Wednesday, the santa-monk, Q., is the type of landslide in Southern Quebec.
Simon Lagault, a science communicator with Ouranos – climate science and climate change innovation hub – explained that most of the St. Lawrence valley is covered in the soil.
“So what we see mostly in the southern Quebec, is just a sloppy slide or just like a soil that loses stability or gets slightly more liquefied and just gradually penetrates into the lower land,” he said.
According to data from the government website of the government, every year municipal authorities are reported to have about 100 landslides and unstable land incidents and are more frequent during spring and fall, or during extreme meteorological events.
Extreme weather makes the land less stable
For Philip Gachon, a professor of the Geography Department of Universit du Cubek -e -Montreal, which stands in Wednesday’s incident is the magnitude of Landslide that has rarely seen in recent years in Cubek. “
In a phone interview with Canadian press, Gachon gestured and added the clay as a landslide risk, which has become less stable due to the more extreme weather conditions.
The soil can become unstable due to excessive rain or excessive dryness, they explained – and Cubek has seen both in recent years.
“Clay does not like when there is too much water, and it does not like it when there is not enough water because it has a tendency to fracture,” he said.
Since the extreme weather becomes more common, he says that it is important to better understand the completeness of the water cycle in the province, which he said that the hydrological “whiplash” is unsafe due to the excessive wet and alternative period of dryness.
He said, “It is clear that with climate change, we are going to face events that we have never experienced before, some events that we have never seen before in history,” he said.
Climate change increases risk, experts say
Legault also believes that climate change is likely to increase the risk of landslides in the future.
Over the next decades, he says that the province is expected to see more rain, and the earlier of the spring melting, allowing more water to enter the ground.
“Water is a factor that can contribute to the ground movement or landslides because you need more water, or excess of water inside the ground that causes that liqueurization,” he said.
High risk of landslides, however, not necessarily the frequency has increased, he said, “depends on how we customize the terrain.”
Currently, estimates suggest that 40 percent landslides “are associated with poor practices associated with human activities that affect slope stability,” according to Ouranos’s website.
“We have natural landslides, but we sometimes have population that is just modifying the slope,” Lagault said.
Things such as building a structure at the top of a hill, digging at the bottom of a slope, makes something that will direct a slope or more water towards cutting the trees, examples of all activities that can contribute to increasing the risk of landslides.
Legault stated that municipal and provincial provincial officials are working to understand the land better to know where the risks are the most. This work should continue, he said, and it is important that the population also knows risks.
