[MUSIC PLAYING]
[RUNNING WATER]
SPEAKER 1: This
doesn't seem right.
The oldest guy has
to walk the farthest.
I'm Scott Linneman, with the
Geology Department at Western
Washington University.
And today we're going on a field
trip to Sumas Mountain to see
a large, actually very large,
landslide-- active landslide--
that's been slowly moving
down Sumas Mountain,
probably for hundreds of years,
but in its current incarnation
the last 60 years.
It dumps a lot of sediment
into the little creek
here, which causes
problems downstream
in the agricultural areas.
And so we've been up here
studying the landslide,
the way it develops,
how fast it's moving,
to try to make
some predictions as
to how much sediment the
downstream users are going
to have to deal with.
This is a class from--
let's see, it's
Geology 310, which
is the geomorphology class.
That class studies
beaches, and glaciers,
and rivers, and hill slopes.
And landslides
are the thing that
moves the sediment from the
hill slopes to the streams.
And, unlike every other place
I've taught, where you just
have to read about
it, these students
get to come and actually
walk on the landslide,
experience the landslide,
and get a sense
of how those processes work.
One of the things
we've discovered
is that, when students
learn about a process
by being there
while it's going on,
they remember it a lot longer,
as opposed to reading about it,
regurgitating it on a test.
So I've had students
come back and talk to me
years after graduating.
They remember every
bit of this afternoon
because it was something like
they've never seen before.
And it's important
geologically, like I said,
because landslides are the
delivery mechanism of sediment
down to streams,
and this one just
happens to be a really big one.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
