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Nov 30, 2020 · Everyone was able to escape the avalanche's path except Lindsay and Patricia Palmer-Tomkinson, who broke both legs in the accident. After the snowslide had ceased, Charles and the rest...
3 days ago · Utah Avalanche Center published a report of the May 9 Big Willow avalanche on Friday. Andrew Cameron, 22, of Cottonwood Heights, and Austin Mallet, 32, of Bozeman, Montana, were fully buried and ...
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Feb 21, 2021 · Avalanches kill more than a 100 people worldwide each year. We have stories of three people who were caught in avalanches and survived. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: It doesn't take all that much...
Feb 12, 2021 · 15 avalanche deaths in one week. In the early February incident, two groups of four skiers each in Millcreek Canyon, Utah, were buried by an avalanche in which four survived and four did not. On ...
- Overview
- What causes avalanches?
- What happens inside the snowpack during an avalanche?
- What can skiers do if they're in an avalanche?
- How is avalanche risk changing as winter temperatures rise?
Nathalie Vriend is an associate professor of thermo fluid sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
An avalanche swept up skiers at Lake Tahoe's largest ski resort on Jan. 10, 2024, as a 150-foot-wide sheet of snow slid down a mountain slope into a pile 10 feet deep. One person died in the avalanche and three others were rescued, according to the Placer County Sheriff's Office in Auburn, California. The slide happened in steep terrain near the KT-22 chairlift, which had just opened for the season that morning. A second unplanned avalanche hit the same ski resort the next day, but no one was injured.
The behavior of an avalanche depends on the structure of the snowpack, but that's only one ingredient. An avalanche requires all the wrong conditions at the wrong time.
The angle of the mountain slope is important. Slopes between 25 and 40 degrees run the greatest risk of avalanches. Those are also ideal for skiing, of course. If the slope is less than 25 degrees, there might be little slips, but the snow won't pick up speed. If it's over 40 degrees, the snow typically cannot accumulate, clearing away the avalanche risk.
Mountain snowpack isn't uniform. Because it builds up over time, it is a snapshot of recent weather conditions and has both stable and weak layers.
When snow falls, it's a fluffy crystal structure. But when the temperature rises and the snow starts to melt and then refreezes, it turns more granular.
That granular, icier snow is a weak layer. When a new snowfall dumps on top of it, the grains in the weak layer can shear, creating a surface for an avalanche to slide on. The weight of new snowpack can cause the entire face of a mountain to fall away almost instantaneously. As the avalanche picks up speed, more snow and debris are incorporated in the avalanche and it can become really big and violent.
In my lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I study small-scale laboratory avalanches. We use a technique called photoelasticity and create thin avalanches to reveal what's going on inside the avalanche. We track photoelastic particles with a high-speed camera and can observe that particles bounce and collide really fast, within 1/1,000th of a second.
I've done fieldwork on real snow avalanches triggered intentionally in Switzerland. We were in a bunker in a valley, and they dropped explosives at the top of the mountain. Using radar, we could look inside the avalanche as it came toward us. It was easily going more than 110 miles per hour (50 meters per second).
Even if the avalanche is small, you can't outski or outrun it easily. The big danger is when the snow is deep – you could be buried under several feet of snow. Basically, as the avalanche slows down, new snow keeps piling on top of you. People report this as being trapped in concrete without an ability to even move a limb. It must be a very frightening experience.
Backcountry skiers carry tools that can increase their chances of survival. Your best bet, though, is your peers – particularly in the backcountry, where emergency crews will take hours to arrive.
There are a few things you can do. First, carry a transceiver, which transmits a signal identifying your location. When you are caught in an avalanche, you are transmitting a signal. Your friends can switch their transceivers to the "receiving" mode and try to locate your beacon. It's also important to have an avalanche probe and a shovel in the backcountry for when your friends do locate your position: The snow is like concrete, and it will be hard to extract you.
It's an important question, and it's not as simple as warming temperatures mean less snow, so fewer avalanches. Instead, if mountains have more variation in temperatures, they may have more melting and refreezing phases during the winter, creating weaker snowpacks compared with historical records.
The historical conditions that communities have grown up around can change. In 2017, there was a big avalanche in Italy that took out an entire hotel. It was in an area where people didn't expect an avalanche, based on historical data.
There are computer models that can calculate where avalanches are likely to occur. But when temperatures, snowfall and precipitation patterns change, you may not be able to truly understand cause and effect on natural hazards like snow avalanches.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
May 10, 2024 · 9 May 2024. CBS/KUTV. A rescue helicopter heads to Lone Peak in Utah. Two skiers were killed and one was rescued by helicopter after an avalanche in the mountains outside Salt Lake City in Utah on...
Jan 3, 2012 · The avalanche responsible for killing the most climbers in the U.S. was triggered by a massive icefall on Mt. Rainier (14,411 feet) on June 21, 1981. Eleven climbers—including one guide—were swept into a crevasse and buried under 70 feet of snow and ice, making it impossible to recover any of the bodies.
