Mount Meager’s Last Mega-Landslide Was Catastrophic — The Next One Could Be Worse

On August 6, 2010, in the dead of night, a piece of a mountain larger than 20,000 Olympic swimming pools collapsed. It wasn't an earthquake. It wasn't a volcanic eruption. It was a gargantuan landslide, one of the largest in Canadian history. 53 million cubic meters of rock and debris accelerated to over 230 km/h (143 mph), generating a seismic shockwave felt hundreds of miles away and damming a major river in an instant. By sheer luck, no one was killed. But this was not a freak accident. It was a warning. The Mount Meager massif, a stunning glacier-clad volcano 150km north of Vancouver, is dying from the inside out. For thousands of years, its core has been dissolving, turned into soft, rotten clay by its own internal volcanic heat and acidic water. The only thing holding this "rotten mountain" together has been its thick armor of glaciers. But now, that ice is melting. As the glaciers retreat, they are exposing the unstable mountainside, and the risk of another, even larger, collapse is becoming a mathematical certainty. This documentary explores the catastrophic 2010 Mount Meager landslide and the terrifying new discoveries that have followed. We investigate the 2016 discovery of mysterious holes melted in the Job Glacier, which led to perilous expeditions deep inside toxic ice caves carved by active volcanic vents. We reveal how the 2010 slide is still impacting the downstream town of Pemberton today, as millions of tons of sediment slowly raise the riverbed and increase flood risk. Featuring expert analysis from leading volcanologists like Dr. Glyn Williams-Jones and geohazards specialists, we uncover how climate change is acting as the trigger on one of North America's most dangerous and unstable volcanoes. This is the story of a mountain that doesn't need to erupt to unleash a disaster, and the quiet, ticking clock that gets louder with every passing year.