EDMONTON — Perhaps the most amazing thing about the world's biggest beaver dam is that nobody knew it existed, until a scientist spotted it on a satellite image taken from space.
The enormous dam is, perhaps, a reminder that there are still wild places on Earth, places where the natural world still rules.
One such place is found in a lush, remote corner of Wood Buffalo National Park, tucked at the base of Alberta's Birch Mountains. There, generations of beavers have laboured for decades on an 850-metre-long dam that is longer than eight football fields stretched end-to-end, or one and a half times the height of the CN Tower.
The beavers of Wood Buffalo have worked for at least 35 years to build the dam, which means it has already taken 15 years longer to build than the Taj Mahal, one of the seven wonders of the world.
The beavers are still building, and the dam still causes a stir more than three years after its discovery.
Environmental scientist Jean Thie was actually trying to figure out the effect of melting permafrost when he started noticing the beaver dams and measuring them as a hobby.
"This one is spectacularly long," he said in an interview Wednesday, noting most beaver dams are less than 100 metres long. "It is part of the 'beaver belt' that runs from lower lands around the Riding Mountain National Park (in Manitoba) up through (Alberta's) Birch Mountains."
"They are remarkable water engineers," he said. "There are some really exceptional beaver landscapes, where you have hundreds of dams that are affecting the streams.
"Usually these are inaccessible areas, like this one."
Thie didn't make a fuss when he discovered the dam, he just quietly posted his research on his website.
A group of journalists travelling to Wood Buffalo National Park to film a documentary on wolves then called park spokesman Mike Keizer, and asked if they could visit the world's biggest beaver dam while they were there.
Keizer told them he didn't know anything about a big beaver dam in the park, and they pointed him to Thie's website.
Surprised, Keizer sent staff out to find the dam. They located it deep in the boreal forest just south of the Birch Mountains, halfway between the south tip of Lac Clair and the park's southern boundary.
"It's in one of the most remote areas you'll find in this park," he said. "It is quite literally in the middle of nowhere -- there are no roads, no navigable streams to it.
"The only way we can see right now is to land a helicopter there, and then take a two-day hike in."
Parks staff took photos, which Parks Canada released Wednesday.
Boston University natural science professor Peter Busher has been studying beavers for 35 years. He said the size of the dam is "unbelievable."
He said beavers have a natural impulse to build in running water, creating a dam that in turn creates a pond or lake which they use to access their food supply. In this case, they probably didn't run into any natural impediments, so they kept building, he said.
"We don't know if they are thinking: 'I'm going to stick this branch in this position,' " he said of the beaver's construction skills. "When we look at it, it does look very sophisticated, they'll have branches intertwined and so on."
Beavers are the only other mammal, apart from humans, that manufactures their own environment, he said.
Beavers are monogamous and mate for life, he said, giving birth to an average of two or three kits each year. The newborns and the yearlings live with their parents in a lodge, a small shelter that beavers access from the water.
After two years at home, the young beavers leave the family lodge and start using their continuously growing teeth to maintain the dam and build their own lodges.
Busher said the most intriguing thing about the world's largest beaver dam is that it will give researchers an opportunity to study how beavers live in the wild, far away from human intervention.
