We donate our waste canisters to all sorts of people for all kinds of reasons but we never thought that landslide research would be one of them!
Phil came to us asking for large quantities of black plastic pots to take with him to Austria to collect landslide samples in, so we packed him off with a point and shoot to show us what he got up to.
The Ötztal Valley, Tyrol, Austria contains some of the best preserved landslide deposits in Europe from 3000-12000 years ago. The Energy produced by mass rock slope failures can be thousands of times greater than a nuclear explosion. The distribution of energy during the disintegration phase of these events is poorly understood. Using optically stimulated luminescence technology, we can map out these deposits to study historic heat generation patterns of sediment to help expand existing knowledge regarding the kinematics of landslides and frictional heating.
One of the challenges with this type of study is transporting sediment from the field whilst not allowing any light exposure, meaning film canisters are ideal but difficult to acquire in bulk quantities. That's where Take it Easy came in! We donated hundreds of film canisters for this project, allowing the material sampled from these rock formations to stay in the dark from the valley until their ultimate destination at the Luminescence Laboratory.
The repurposing of these canisters will also be used to support future projects in the field of Environmental Science, Archaeology and Geology at the University of Liverpool.
