Brief by Allen Best
Avalanches – September 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
It’s the sort of stuff that only a snow nerd could care about, but mountain towns are full of snow nerds.
The issue is how slab avalanches are precipitated. The conventional thinking has been that gravity mattered a great deal. In other words, the angle of the slope was all-important.
But in a report published in Science Magazine in July, a team of researchers say that the initial crack in the snow depends more on the perpendicular pull.
“This research is really an entirely new paradigm for how the fractures that result in snow avalanches work,” said Karl Birkeland of Montana State University. The study was summarized in Science News.
