Rock avalanches in northeastern Baffin Island, Canada: understanding low occurrence amid high hazard potential
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Rock avalanches in fjord environments can cause direct catastrophic damage and trigger secondary submarine landslides and tsunamis. These are well-documented in Greenland, Norway, and Alaska but have gone largely unreported in the extensive fjord terrain of the eastern Canadian Arctic. We provide the first inventory of rock avalanche deposits in northeastern Baffin Island—a region characterized by moderate to high seismic hazard, steep and high-walled fjords and glacial valleys, active deglaciation, and observed climate warming. Over a broad study area of ~60,000 km 2 , one sixth of the terrain had sufficient slope height and gradient to potentially generate rock avalanches. Within that hazard zone, we identified eight rock avalanche deposits at six locations. Only three rock avalanche deposits at two locations are dated, using aerial imagery (1958-present), to the last century while five deposits at four locations are inferred as syn- to post-glacial, likely occurring shortly after local debuttressing. These total numbers fall well below documented inventories from Greenland, Norway, and Alaska. We hypothesize that (1) continuous permafrost persists throughout this region and continues to act as a stabilizing factor and (2) rock mass quality is high in areas of most extreme relief contrast within the study region relative to analogous high-latitude fjord systems such as those in southwestern Greenland. We suggest that Baffin Island is currently in a period of quasi-stability that follows the intense instability during initial deglaciation, yet precedes the higher anticipated slope instability that may occur during permafrost degradation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".