Blacks Beach San Diego Bluffs Collapse (1:29pm Jan 20 2023)

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Thank you for filming this widescreen, with a steady hand, and without screaming.

At least this guy recorded in widescreen. Nice job.

This is the best video of this event. It actually captures the very beginning of the true landslide structures emerging. For example, at about 3:00 start watching where the beach sand meets the cliff. You can actually see the toe of the landslide forming from thrust faulting underneath the sand, and the thrust front rapidly aggrades and prograded into an uplifted, hummocky surface in front of the cliff. You can also observe the entire slide block rotating away from the headscarp. If you scrub from the beginning to the end you can see how much the big block pointing upwards at the beginning has dropped by the end and rotated away from the headscarp of the slide. Very cool. Edit: all that black sand being pushed up with the slide-front toe thrusts is organic-rich, full of decaying organic matter. To the videographer: walking up to the toe slide minutes after it formed was INCREDIBLY dangerous. You were literally in mortal danger there. Landslides are basically blocks that slough off of a highland along a normal fault (the head scarp), which then curves and flattens out under the slide (we call this curved type of fault a “listric fault”). At the point where the slide block begins to encroach upon the land in front of it, the slide material is thrust up and over it. This is called the “toe” of the landslide, and it’s what you walked up to. What this means is, any continued movement/rotation of the slide block away from the headscarp and down the listric fault surface will propagate that thrust front or landslide toe right up from under where you were standing in that video. You could easily have been engulfed in any forward movement. And though this one moved relatively slowly for a landslide, there is no telling whether it could have started sliding again with even more material, and you could have been buried in an instant. Never, ever go up to an active landslide toe.

Wow. Something like this can take hundreds of years to happen, but you were there at the exact time that it happened. And you captured it for all of us to share. Thank you. Incredible.

The large tumbling rocks were interesting, but the most important view was the zoomed-out one. That showed the vertical descent of the slope along the upper section of the fracture and the ensuing lateral displacement of the lower deposits. This is not an uncommon slope-failure mode, especially for aged sandstone. This was not the result of any fault activity, but rather the result of deterioration of the material forming the bluffs and the slope below it.

When I was younger, my grandparents lived in San Diego with a canyon similar to this hillside behind their house. Each year as I grew older, the canyon seemed closer to their fenceline. I was always afraid that this would happen in the canyon, taking them and their house down the hill. They have long since passed away and the house is no longer in the family, but this made me remember my old fear.

That lift on the beach! The cliff failure was kind of expected after all the rain , but to see that sand displaced was fascinating! Look down the beach, sheer vertical!

Unbelievable that this was caught on a good timing and no one got hurt. This was amazing and how powerful this rock slide was. That was amazing

Thanks for being smart enough to film this correctly! Always film horizontal! It eliminates those annoying black bars on the side when watching in full screen. Also thank you for taking the risk for getting up close to the base. As someone just watching, I really couldn’t get a good impression of how huge that sand really was until you got closer. That’s incredible!

Really epic footage Kent! The cliffs have been eroding for years. Around 2003, we walked north from Scripps Pier over the rocks to watch a surf contest on Black's. As we stepped onto the beach from the tidepools, there was a huge cloud of smoke on the beach where the contest was gathered. When we got closer, we realized it was a huge collapse of the cliffs. Some surfers had all their boards and stuff on towels just below as it began crumbling. The kids told me it all started as a few pebbles and that caught their attention and they began running. They lost everything under the rubble. The debris field was 6-8ft high and covered about 40 yards onto the beach. Glad nobody was hurt.

"The newly-born rocklings, suddenly freed from the rigid matrix in which they were previously bound, gallop joyfully down the mountainside; they revel in their newfound freedom. Soon enough though, they come to rest exhausted but happy on the plain below... gravity having worked her constant magic once again". - Basil Clodhandler, "The Secret Life of Rocks", 1973 (First Edition) All joking aside, this was absolutely incredible to watch. Thanks for the upload mate.

Much better video than the person who was south of you. What was most amazing was the way the black rock and soil rose up so quickly and so high.

Thanks for being patient, incredible footage of the how the terrain changes in time, and having footage how this happens. Great job!!

Great video and thanks for posting it! I'm a geologist here in SD and frequent that area often. It was amazing to watch the toe of that slope bulldoze part of the beach, I hadn't see that before.

Finally someone that knows how to film stuff correctly. No running, screaming and you did it in the angle.

Great capture! Thanks for sharing it with all of us. I’ve lived in So Cal my entire life and can’t remember seeing video of the exact moment a cliff gives way. It seems like the affected area stretched a mile wide. Thanks again!

Years ago I used to descend and climb those cliffs often to go surfing. The trails were very narrow in places and if you met someone going in the opposite direction, you had to either hug the wall or hug them as you went by. There were a few times we stayed out a bit too long and had to climb the cliff in the dark. That was a big sketchy at best. Most of the trails stayed there for years, but some changed as the cliffs changed, but I never saw anything this drastic. Interesting to watch but scary as well knowing that will never stop. The cliffs will continue to erode and wear away no matter what we do. It's how the Earth works and it doesn't give a damn where we build shit.

Well, huge thank you for filming this in landscape mode! 👍😎 Also for great fotage! Looking at this in the middle of the night in Sweden 🇸🇪 thousands of miles away..

This is incredible to see. Thanks for capturing this footage.