TheSnowpit.com News Blog

• Juneau gets its forecast center back
• Early season slide in Summit County, Colorado
• Good Press for The Fine Line
• Bacteria discovered as snow nucleation instigators

Early season mayhem continues - thin snowpack, crusts, bad skiing. But, for the people of Juneau, early season has finally brought them a forecaster. Tom Mattice from Colorado replaces Bill Glude who previously performed that job. If the Juneau forecasts take the same spin that they did previously, these forecasts will be more inclined toward the safety of homeowners than recreationalists.

But Colorado has not even started their forecasts for the season yet, which of course doesn't stop Mother Nature. I was sad to hear that probably the first avalanche injuries of the season occurred on Torrey's Peak in Colorado, with three climbers taking a 1000-foot ride. According to the article, the avalanche occurred in a windslab via human trigger.

Which means it's time to dust off those beacons, get new batteries, and, if you need to, get yourself some edumacation. The Rocky Mountain Sherpas are doing their part by touring with their excellent film The Fine Line. The film has gotten lots of well-deserved good press, which I love seeing as well.

Of course, the science of snow formation continues to be a great mystery despite the fact that we love, fear, and ski upon snow all the time. When it only consists of supercooled water, snow needs something to freeze around, which can be dust, pollution, or....bacteria? Interestingly enough, scientists have just discovered that ice-nucleating bacteria, often the cause of plant ailments, can also serve as the best snow nucleation material known. Does this mean Nevada will stop shooting silver oxide into the air and start shooting pathogens instead?

• The fickle link between glaciers and global warming
• Congress's cap on visas affects ski resorts
• Snow search and rescues don't stop for the summer
• Study in artificial crack introduction gives food for thought to avalanche science

The problem with global warming is that no one is quite sure what it will look like when it comes. A melted, barren Earth, or a new Ice Age? Melting seems to be the obvious clue in the short term, and there are many indications of that occurring around the world. Some point to the poster child of the crumbling North Face of the Eiger, weakened by the retreat of the Grindelwald glacier. Of course, I've previously reported on glacial recession in India, a lawsuit between Kivalina and the Alaska oil companies for causing warming and destroying their way of life, and even a bit on the global warming issue in the upcoming presidential elections.

But not all is melting. Rainier still has 8 feet of snow on the ground, delaying the wildflower season. And Shasta's glaciers keep growing, which also gets blamed on global warming by the media. The Canadian article above also mentions that other glaciers in Norway, Sweden, New Zealand and Pakistan seemed to go through the same growth spurt as Shasta's glaciers earlier, but are now shrinking due to the continually increased heat.

Speaking of things drying up, Congress continues to put limits on Visas coming in to the country, this time on skilled worker visas. Anyone who has attended a university recently, especially on the technology side, has probably witnessed the extreme hardship that the Bush administration is putting on students with visas from countries such as India, Iran, and surrounding areas. In my opinion this is pretty dumb, as reducing our global impact on technology education seems to be a pretty sure way to bring this country closer to failure. But beyond that narrow view of the world, the visa limit from Congress is also expected to decrease the number of skilled ski instructors that ski resorts will employ this year. That's right, Bush: just keep plugging up all our international avenues in the interest of 'protection'.

Search and Rescue missions continue year round, and this month is no exception. With a bunch of callouts after the July 4 weekend, two major snow-related searches also occurred in Canada and Australia. The one in Canada was for a solo scrambler on Mount Kidd. The rescue was complicated by the state of the snowfields. Interestingly, the news article calls the entrance of water into a snowfield a "moat" which I always thought was the separation between a large rock formation and a glacier, whereas the entrance of water into a glacier or snowfield from the surface was a "moulin". I wonder what it looked like out there. In either case, the fall was definitely a tragedy. A solo scrambler also got lost over the holiday near Bishop (more geographically near me), and both incidents definitely hit home after my own scrambling trip this past weekend.

The other snow incident that makes my heart ache is the search in Australia for a
pair of people who deserted their car after getting stranded in the winter backroads. For anyone who has done the hypothetical "Blizzard Survival Exercise" where (on paper) your car gets stuck in a blizzard, you have a number of seemingly irrelevant items in your car, and you need to prioritize them to survive, you quickly realize that important survival items such as fuel for fire (tires), source for lighting fires (cigarette lighter) and warmth and insulation (foam from seat cushions) are actually an integral part of your car. (An e-copy has been mostly posted on this bulletin board, complete with expert's answers.) And the exercise is intended to show only one thing: Don't separate yourself from your car. My thoughts are with those people out there.

On the other side of the globe in Edinburgh, avalanche scientists ran a paper in the more popular Science Magazine on the correspondence between slope angle and the 'critical crack length' needed to start an avalanche. Oddly, they found that the length did not drastically decrease with slope as previously thought, and they also examined the idea that anticrack mechanisms may play a role in avalanche sliding.

Not only has popular media eaten this up, (also here in Sciencenews) but previous articles in seismology have also explored the idea of anticracks overcoming the frictional barrier under pressure. Sciencenews describes the anticrack idea as a house of cards ready to fall down, creating a cavity, and leaving the snow unsupported. I feel like this is a similar concept to the idea of "deficit zones", introduced by Conway and Abrahmson in 1984, and revisited in many papers since, including this one (PDF) entitled On the Role of Deficit Zones or Imperfections in Dry Snow Slab Avalanche Release. So cool, and good work.

• Three survive Hood Avalanche
• The McCain Climate Speech
• Glacier National Park and the Shells vs Sheds Debate
• Federal Land Avalanche Monitoring Bill returns to the Senate
• Heat re-activates Blackcomb's Dec 5 crust

The recent heat has already brought on a few incidents. Blackcomb closed all but two lifts this past weekend due to obvious avalanches and instability. Cornice failures, snow coming loose from rocks, and other natural triggers persist, and a few class-3 avalanches have occured in closed areas in-bounds. Further south, snow came loose from a rock outcropping and sent three climbers for a 350 foot ride on Mount Hood near the Pearly Gates. The climbers survived and descended the mountain with the assistance of Mountain Rescue.

For those of you who, like me, were a little unnerved by the extensive west-wide heat over the last week, perhaps it's time to read McCain's Climate speech, complete with commentary. He poo-poos modeling, brings the issues away from just fossil fuels, proposes increased nuclear power research, and speaks of pressing the issues internationally. An interesting view on how at least one politician views global warming. This was followed up shortly afterwards with commentary on how global warming affects hurricanes and storms. Though not explicitly snow-related, the search for answers for what global warming will do to our planet before it actually occurs continues....

Some classic issues are still present, however. Environmentalists continue to keep tabs on Glacier's plan to use artillery to control avalanches. BNSF Railroad has suffered losses in the past because of avalanches coming off of land located within the park, and wishes to use artillery to control the avalanche risk. Though snow sheds over the rails would be a less-impactful option to the park land in question, the initial investment to construct sheds has BNSF balking and as the rails themselves lie outside of park land, Glacier can only prevent shelling, not require shed building. Started in 2004, the political struggle grinds on.

Sometimes politics aren't all bad, however. Struggling with what could be called the greatest avalanche risk in the country and only one federal avalanche forecast center (Chugach) to help, Alaska's Ted Stevens has re-introduced a bill to require federal avalanche monitoring of federal lands. Though successful in the Senate twice before, the bill has not yet seen success in the House. Maybe a third time will be a charm.