The remains of the Frank slide in Alberta’s Crowsnest Pass are an amazing sight: Ton upon ton of huge boulders litter the valley floor. The highway winds through a devastated landscape of rock where nothing grows, and the side of one whole mountain is a barren wall.

Turtle Mountain is the fastest moving mountain in the Rockies and, as such, fascinating to all folks of a geologic persuasion. The Mountain’s biggest move came with a massive slide in 1903, but the south face of the remaining mountain is still shifting, and poses a very real threat of future slides.

To see the system in action, visit:
http://turtle.ags.gov.ab.ca/Turtle_Mountain/Site/

In 1903, 90 million tons of rock came sliding down the side of Turtle Mountain, burying part of the town of Frank and killing 70 people in the process. Today, there is a government-run interpretive centre at the site, which recently underwent a multi-million dollar revamp. Visitors can learn all about the slide, and the on-going movement of the mountain.

Turtle Mountain is the fastest moving mountain in the Rockies and, as such, fascinating to all folks of a geologic persuasion. The Mountain’s biggest move came with the slide in 1903, but the south face of the remaining mountain is still shifting, and poses a very real threat of future slides. Which has meant that government scientists have been keeping an eye on the mountain for almost 100 years. In 1911, a Royal Commission study found the North Peak of Turtle Mountain to be structurally unstable. In reaction, the government ordered everyone out of the area, so people moved to other areas of the Crowsnest Pass, and many settled in New Frank.

Lately, that eye has consisted of a collection of sophisticated electronic sensors, whose information can now be accessed through the web.

How sophisticated, you ask?

Well, if the mountain moves suddenly, the system will send an email, and even make a phone call to warn researchers - hopefully in time for them to warn the public.

The system features a newly developed Geographic Information System (GIS) application, which means, which means you can log on and see what’s happening on the mountain for yourself. The online system was developed over the past couple of years by scientists with the Geohazard section of the Alberta Geological Survey. It incorporates functionalities shared by the ArcGIS user community and a charting function developed by the Environmental Engineering folks at the University of Alberta.

To see the system in action, visit:
http://turtle.ags.gov.ab.ca/Turtle_Mountain/Site/

The system is unique enough that it was presented at the global GeoWeb conference in Vancouver in 2009. As outlined in the presentation given by Dennis Chao of the Survey, “The application provides a bird eye’s view of the area, including high-resolution images presented as map layers. Users can turn on or off each layer, navigate around the area using pan and zoom, query each layer spatially or by attributes stored in its database, obtain metadata, view the area in three dimensions (3-D), and create geotechnical graphs and plots with near–real-time and historical data.”

In other words, there’s lots of cool data to play around with! There’s even a study guide for teachers available on the Survey website.

Student and Teacher resources: http://www.ags.gov.ab.ca/outreach/outreach.html