Before coming to work here at Depiction, I taught middle school science, including earth science. The key theme of a middle school earth science course is that the surface of the earth is constantly changing. Though it looks like it is static, that’s only because the changes come very slowly, or very rarely. One of the reasons I am excited about Depiction is its great potential for use in earth science, because it treats the earth like the dynamic thing it really is.

Gravity is one of the key factors in causing this change. Erosion caused by gravity, such as mudslides and landslides, is called “mass wasting,” or “mass movement” and it can drastically change the entire geography of a region, sometimes very quickly. The Bonneville Landslide, along the Columbia River, is an example of a mass movement that drastically changed a small part of earth’s surface.

A few hundred years ago, a landslide from Table Mountain tumbled into the Columbia River, creating a barrier of over 200 feet that, for a time, completely blocked the river. This event seemed like a good candidate to recreate using Depiction, both in terms of scale and simplicity for my first work with the program.

I jumped right into the creation of a depiction after taking a quick look at the Indian Ocean example scenario depiction. I used the NED 30m elevation data and NASA Landsat 7 imagery only, not needing any street or other modern information. I created two “change elevation height” elements to recreate the natural dam, next to the landslide toe that is still visible near the Bonneville Dam. Then I flooded the Columbia River behind the dam to get a sense of what the lake created by the landslide might have looked like. The main map used the elevation data, but I added a Revealer to show the flooding over the satellite imagery. Then, after adding a couple annotations, the depiction was essentially finished.

The ability to manipulate landforms & water levels makes Depiction a great tool for modeling geologic events such as landslides, and playing with that concept was a great way to get a feel for the system. If you’re curious about what Depiction can do with this kind of thing, download the trial, and try your hand at making a quick model of a mass wasting event, either real or hypothetical.