TheSnowpit.com News Blog

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?

• 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.