TheSnowpit.com News Blog

Two Crazy Incidents with Thankfully Good Outcomes

• John Griber survives serac fall on Everest
• Plane propeller saves two on Wester Ross Peak, Scotland

To begin, the stunning photographs and first hand account on TetonAT make John Griber's survival of a serac fall on Everest quite gut-clenching. Few of us have the opportunity to witness an avalanche of that size, much less be a speck upon the glacier immediately below the falling snow.

By chance, he was clipped in to a fixed line and behind a serac relative to the avalanche, and he believes this saved him. Thank goodness.

Then, two climbers were reported to have been saved by a propeller after being caught in an avalanche on Wester Ross Peak in Scotland. The plane providing the propeller wreckage had crashed into the mountain in 1951, killing the eight crew aboard.

The roped team crashed into and then hung from the propeller as the avalanche passed over them. They named their newly ascended route Bruised Violet in honor of the color that the propeller inflicted upon one of their arms.

Jane Candlish of The Press and Journal quotes the Scottish Avalanche Information Service co-ordinator, Mark Diggins:

It is astonishing to think that those men lost their lives on that plane and yet it saved someone’s life in the future.

Two good laughs to ease your Monday

What do you do when it's July and there's no powder? Revisit classic hilarious snow movies on Youtube.

First, if you've ever tried a seal launch in a whitewater kayak, you'll appreciate how totally nuts this one is: Snow Kayaking! About 2.5 minutes of great footage, some German explanations, jumps, and classic shots of whitewater kayaks riding the powder:

Then, a true oldie but goodie: Norwegian Tree Jumping. Basically, snow, skis, jumps, and trees. Once you see the first thirty seconds, the rest should be self-explanatory:

Enjoy!

In this issue:

• Windmill-based remote weather stations track snowmelt
• Ancient ecosystem creates red ice in Antarctica
• Bead avalanche size can be predicted from system disorder

We'll start out with a new type of weather station in Maine: an off-the-grid windmill and a bucket. No, really. These snowmelt measuring weather stations can go far off the grid because they are both solar and wind powered -- getting a distinct winter-time advantage from the fact that when the sun is hiding, the wind may be accompanying the clouds.

Then, it's one thing to find a self-contained ecosystem behind glass and sponsored by the government, but yet another to find it naturally and blatantly spilling out in red glory from an antarctic ice shelf. The microbes involved in the odd color of the ice floe live in very cold salty water and munch on iron and sulfur -- much like conditions would be for living on the moon Europa.

Finally, remember the theory link between snow avalanches and self-organized criticality (i.e. sandpile avalanches?) Well, a new bit of research shows that the size of bead avalanches can be predicted by the disorder in the system (pile) prior to the avalanche occurring. Their measure of disorder was the 'space factor', or space between the 4 mm steel beads, and piles included up to 55,000 beads at a time.

Beads, windmills, and red ice. Whatever will July bring?