SpaceMika

On September 12th, 1717, a huge landslide came down off Mont Blanc in the Alps and ran across Triolet Glacier. Boulders, water, and ice were entrained in the flow. The landslide killed 7 men, 120 oxen or cows, and destroyed a whole lot of cheese (Grove 2004). The travel path came down the slope, splashed up the valley side, then continued down the valley about 5 km (Grove 2004 citing De Tillier 1968 & Porter and Orombelli 1980).

Triolet Glacier on Mont Blanc: location of the profile. Image credit to Google & HeyWhatsThat.com.

From Grove, “The debris of the giant rockfall from the Aiguille de L’Eboulement which swept the Triolet glacier in 1717 is estimated to have a volume of 16-20 million cubic meters and have descended 1860 m over a distance of 7 km in a few minutes.” However, this debris distribution has been revised quite a bit by other authors — Deline and Kirkbridge (2008) vastly reduced the scale of the event to 7.3-9.8 million cubic meters with the deposit covering 2.9 square kilometers to a depth of 2.5-3.4 meters.

Profile of Triolet Glacier: this is the cross-section I’m using for my DAN-W model. Image credit to HeyWhatsThat.com.

So far, modeling it hasn’t worked for me. I suspect this is because glaciers are slippery.