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seventeenth April 2026
Extra strain doesn’t make a snowpack extra secure, however the truth is extra prone to avalanches. The brand new findings come from the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Analysis, SLF, in Switzerland. NEW
The brand new knowledge might assist to additional enhance avalanche forecasting and an understanding of how and why avalanches happen.
Weak layers within the snowpack are sometimes the reason for slab avalanches.
The forces that trigger these weak layers to interrupt and thus result in avalanches are nonetheless disputed in avalanche analysis.
Because the Seventies, two opinions have clashed on this problem.
Idea One
Further strain from above, for instance from a thicker or heavier snowpack, makes the weak layer extra secure.
In line with this concept, extra strain from above requires stronger so-called shear forces, which pull the snow down the slope to trigger a fracture.
Idea Two
In line with the opposite concept, it’s exactly this extra strain from above that brings the delicate layer nearer to break down, in order that even a decrease shear load is enough to set off a fracture.
The brand new experiments now help this concept.
Avalanche in Tignes. Picture c/o David Morgan.
For the examine, the researchers analysed 63 samples of pure weak layers within the chilly laboratory.
The snow samples got here from the Davos within the Graubünden area and had been subjected to mixed compressive and shear forces utilizing a specifically developed check equipment.
The samples consisted of snow-covered floor frost.
Within the laboratory, the researchers simulated the forces appearing on the snow cowl on a slope: the vertical regular power and the parallel shear power.
They develop particularly effectively on the Flüelabach stream in Davos: SLF PhD scholar Jakob
A high-speed digicam recorded the precise second at which the layers broke.
Captured by the high-speed digicam: when does the weak layer break? (Video: Jakob Schöttner / SLF
Jakob Schöttner, who’s learning for a PhD in snow mechanics on the SLF, concludes: “Stress doesn’t make the snowpack extra secure; quite, each forces collectively result in failure of the weak layer.”
The outcomes of the examine have been printed within the scientific journal Geophysical Analysis Letters.
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