Monday, April 14, 2008

Busy Beavers

It would take more than a couple sticks of TNT to get rid of this one.

The longest beaver dam observed with Google Earth to date (October 2 2007) is located in Northern Alberta. The dam has a length of about 850 meters (2790 ft). It has at least existed at this spot for over 15 years as it can be observed on the 1990 LandSat 7 Pseudo Color Imagery Provided by NASA World Wind. However 1975 aerial photo's show that this dam did not exist in 1975.

The actual location of the world longest beaver dam (that is until someone find a longer one) is just south of Lac Claire,and about 190 km to the NNE of Fort McMurray, just inside Wood Buffalo National Park. [...]

Best of all, they did not require nor receive any government funding at all for this world breaking project!

2 comments:

ABFreedom said...

I do like how they like to emphasis that melting permafrost due to climate change is a contributing factor.... there hasn't been real solid permafrost in that area for centuries...

Tim said...

How could melting permafrost be a factor if there were beavers in the same area way back in 1975? This dam was not there then as it is seen today, but there were smaller ones shown in the photo's. What were they, ice dams?