20
Geotechnical News • June 2017
GEOHAZARDS
Announcing
7th Canadian Geohazards
Conference – Geohazards 7:
Engineering Resiliency In A
Changing Climate
The Canadian Geotechnical Society
(CGS) is pleased to announce the 7th
Canadian Geohazards Conference –
Geohazards 7 – to be held June 3-6,
2018 at the Coast Canmore Hotel
& Conference Centre in Canmore,
Alberta. The CGS’s Geohazards
conferences are the premiere forums
in Canada for the sharing and dis-
semination of scientific and engineer-
ing knowledge related to geohazard
assessment and risk management.
Canmore is ideally situated for host-
ing Geohazards 7. It is located within
easy travel distance from the Calgary
International Airport, and is less than
a 30-minute drive from Banff National
Park. Heavy rainfall in June 2013
resulted in the worst floods in Alber-
ta’s history. Landslides, debris floods
and debris flows cut off highway and
rail access to Banff and Canmore, and
many homes constructed on allu-
vial fans were destroyed. Municipal
governments, the Province and the
engineering and geoscience commu-
nity have since carried out aggressive
programs to quantify geohazard risk,
increase public awareness of hazards,
and are constructing mitigation mea-
sures to reduce future risk. Canmore is
a terrific venue to showcase the results
of some of these initiatives, which will
feature in the conference program and
fieldtrip.
This conference will be of interest to
engineering and geoscience students
and consultants, industry, and gov-
ernment agency representatives who
are involved in planning, approval,
construction and operation of infra-
structure and residential develop-
ment in areas prone to geohazards.
The conference will touch on the full
gamut of hazards and risks associated
with floods, debris flows, landslides,
snow avalanche, earthquakes, volcanic
eruptions, degrading permafrost and
more. Arming participants with greater
awareness of methods for quantifying
geohazard magnitude and frequency
for risk assessment and mitigation
design, quantifying uncertainty in a
changing climate, and communicat-
ing with the public about geohazard
issues, are key objectives of the
conference.
Closing Notes
If you have a paper or project related
to Geohazards that you think would be
interesting to GN readers, please send
me note at
Have a safe and productive field
season. We’ll see you in September.
Structure from motion and landslides:
The 2010 Mt Meager collapse from slope deformation
to debris avalanche deposit mapping
Gioachino Roberti, Brent Ward, Benjamin Van Wyk de Vries, Luigi Perotti
Topographic reconstruction is a funda-
mental operation in geotechnical and
geomorphological studies. In recent
years, three-dimensional surface
reconstruction has been revolutionized
by the development of Structure from
Motion (SfM) photogrammetry. The
SfM technique allows rapid base map
production from any set of overlap-
ping photographs. Surface information
can be retrieved from these images
without the need of camera calibra-
tion, ground control points, or any
other external information.
We present herein, the application of
SfM to the study of the 2010 Mount
Meager debris avalanche. We used
SfM to produce base maps for a large
scale (1:1000) geomorphic study
of the debris avalanche deposit, to
produce a post-event DEM of the
collapse scar and generate sequential
DEMs to track the deformation of the
Mt Meager flank pre-collapse. In the
