Huge avalanche/rockfall on Rainier?

Oh. em. Gee.

Here's a photo taken from Panorama Point on Sunday:



The main path of the debris crosses the Nisqually Ice Cliff route. On Sunday we heard and saw several "small" events, which from a distance appeared to be hurling boulders the size of cars. The main source of debris is the disintegrating rock of Nisqually Cleaver.

Pretty amazing path of destruction! More debris came down around 4pm on June 25, which can be seen in the next clear webcam view at 6:10pm (compare with first image in the original post above).



Looking through my script-saved webcam images, I came up with this interesting time-lapse animation of images over the last 2 months from May 1 to July 1, showing the obvious motion of the Nisqually Glacier and Icefall, ending with the recent avalanches. The snowdepth at Paradise has decreased from 247" on May 1 (just after the seasonal maximum of 253" on April 28) down to 144" as of July 1.

This 15-frame animated GIF is 6.9 MB in size, so it may load slowly on slow connections.

[size=small](click for full-size 1280x720 version)[/size]

All images (except for June 28) are at the same time of day for near-identical lighting, I picked 9:40am, which had nice clear images on June 22 and 25 before/after the avalanche. They are at several day intervals, whenever a clear image was available. Note that during the 2 weeks between May 20 and June 4, there were NO clear images (even partly clear) at all around that time -- more evidence of a very cloudy Northwest spring.


[size=small]Edited to include more frames in the animation back to May 1 and forward to June 28.[/size]
[size=small]And edited again to include July 1.[/size]

That time lapse is very cool, Amar.
Thanks for doing that.
It reminded me of the mysterious "moving cars in the lot" phenomena wherein you showed, with the same kind of time lapse cam pics, how cars were sliding in the lot on the melting snow/ice.
How do you get to the archived pictures?

check out the video (not ours) .. the debris flow is mind blowing

Amar's time lapse also shows the normal downhill movement of the Nisqually Icefall. Very cool.