Happy Canada Day! The world’s largest beaver dam is so big, you can see it from space

The longest beaver dam is appropriately enough located in Canada.

To celebrate out favourite country and the world’s second favourite country, we thought you would like to know that the largest beaver dam in the world is located in northern Alberta.

The dam has a length of about 850 meters (2790 ft). It has at least existed at this spot for over 25 years as it can be observed on the 1990 Landsat 7 Pseudo Color Imagery provided by NASA World Wind. However 1980 aerial photo’s show that this dam did not exist yet at that time.

The actual location of the world longest beaver dam (that is until someone finds a longer one) is just South of Lake Claire, and about 190 km to the NNE of Fort McMurray, just inside Wood Buffalo National Park.

Until 2008 Wikipedia listed as the largest dam, a dam near Three Forks, Montana, with 652 meters (2,140 feet) long, 4.3 meters (14 feet) high at the highest point, and seven meters (23 feet) thick at the base. This dam has not been visible on Google Earth.

Jean Thie of EcoInformatics who found all this information, located the beaver dam while using Google Earth to study environmental change in Canada’s Boreal and Sub-Arctic Ecoregions.

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Peg Fong is also in recovery from newspapers

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