Description

The Frank landslide was a catastrophic rock avalanche that took place in 1903 on the eastern slope of Turtle Mountain located in the southwestern Alberta, Canada. It buried a portion of the Town of Frank and claimed more than 70 lives. Thirty years later, studies of the remaining portions of the mountain
documented another potential rock slide hazard that was estimated to involve a failure of 5 million m3 of
rock in the area known as South Peak. The present study has applied Persistent/permanent Scatterers
Interferometry SAR (PS-InSAR) technology to map ground deformation in the Frank Slide area using Radarsat-1 data and EarthView InSAR (EV-InSAR) Coherent Target Monitoring (CTM) software developed by Atlantis Scientific Inc (now MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd). The following are some results regarding the success of the application of spaceborne InSAR to map ground deformation
over the Frank Slide area, using Radarsat-1 data acquired with Fine Beam 4 of the ascending pass from April 2004 to October 2006: