3 ms·
> Similarly, a low-energy scream in the montain can trigger a high-energy avalanche. While this is a popular myth, it's actually entirely false. You can shout
by jfindley 8y ago
> Similarly, a low-energy scream in the montain can trigger a high-energy avalanche.
While this is a popular myth, it's actually entirely false. You can shout and scream all you want - there's not enough energy transmitted to the snowpack to actually trigger an avalanche (by at least two orders of magnitude). This has been debunked by multiple studies, one example here: http://www.gblanc.fr/IMG/pdf/reuter2009.pdf http://www.gblanc.fr/IMG/pdf/reuter2009.pdf
- sandworm101 8y agoIt is one of those areas where definitions matter more than reality. Many avalanches happen without external input. At a fraction of a second before one will happen, any extra energy will "cause" it to happen slightly earlier than otherwise. So one could biuld a situation where a shout, or a mouse, could indeed cause an avalanche. It is like heating a pot of water to 100c. It is about to boil. Shout at it and it will start to boil a picosecond faster than if you didnt shout at it. Be really careful with the temperature and maybe your shouting makes it boil when otherwise it never would.
- Retric 8y agoNot all potential avalanches happen. As a positive feedback loop the difference between an avalanche that does or does not happen can be arbitrarily small. Back country snowboarding is a great example where small avalanches are much more common even if most of them don’t become significant. But, because the many small avalanches happen close together they are much more likely to grow. This is also why sound is more effective than you would expect, getting a huge number of tiny avalanches to happen at the same time makes it significantly more likely to form a large one.