Research in the Fraser Delta - Video
The Straight of Georgia is considered to be one of Canada’s most important waterways. Natural Resources Canada have been researching this area for years specifically in the fields of sediment dynamics, this covers dredge disposal, climate change, the natural erosion and deposition of the Delta, the geological processes that take place. And we’ve made several large attempts to understand what causes the failure on the Delta slope.
There is a lot of infrastructure on the Delta front susceptible to slope failure.
There’s also an important eco-system nearby, Glass Sponge Reef, which is quite a rare ecosystem. And we need to understand how sedimentation affects that, how natural sedimentation affects it, as well as how altered sedimentation from man-made projects might affect the reef.
We are fortunate that the University of Victoria has laid this cabled observatory in the centre of the Straight of Georgia, to which scientists can connect their instruments and we’ve extended their cable to bring it up onto the Delta and we now have a node on the Delta front. We can connect high bandwidth and collect much more data than we used to be able to, and all the time measuring data at sub-second sample intervals.
With this information we’ll be able to determine exactly what is leading to these slope failures. And in the future we hope to actually be able to predict them, and to warn the authorities that a failure may be imminent.
Its very exciting research, it’s pioneering, it’s on the forefront of science. I can process the data on time scales of seconds to years which has never been possible before.
The Europeans are now looking at Canada as the leaders in this field. We now have Venus and Neptune and Natural Resources Canada is part of both of those projects.