The civil engineers are tired of buying buried alive

Jan 20, 2009 14:23 GMT  ·  By

Fifty-eight year-old civil engineer Dr. Ed Adams is among the first scientists in the world to boast working in a “cold” lab that creates the same conditions as those that can be found on top of a mountain to the last detail. The expert uses his equipment to better understand exactly how avalanches are formed, how they are triggered, and how varied pressure, applied at different locations, can stop it, or make it go faster. However, his efforts are not as easy as they seem, mostly because snow is in constant motion, and keeping a track of it requires a lot of work and infinite attention.

“Snow seems simple, but it’s extraordinarily complex. If I set a box of snow in the refrigerator and come back in an hour, it’s changed significantly. It’s almost always in a constant state of motion, and studying it is a moving target,” Adams says. His $2-million lab was primarily financed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Murdock Charitable Trust. It allows Adams to control all the unforeseeable variables that may occur in real-life, on mountain slopes of various degrees of inclination.

“The number of fatalities we have had shows they’re a difficult phenomenon for us to understand. There’s definitely a need to better understand them,” Karl Birkeland, Forest Service National Avalanche Center scientist, adds.

“We want to understand what conditions cause the change in the crystalline structure and the bonding between crystals. It’s like a layer cake with very weak frosting,” Adams, who is currently trying to figure out exactly what breaks the bonds between snow flakes and causes the layer to slide on top of each other, thus creating a dreaded avalanche, explains. He says that understanding how this happens may hold the key to better avalanche protection, as well as to better monitoring of dangerous areas, which are currently traveled by tourists, despite warnings.

Now, after years of studying avalanches from a small shack built directly in their path, Adams has finally got a hold of his dream, in the form of a one square-meter snow panel in a room, kept at a chilly minus 8 degrees. The lab can mimic all the conditions the researcher wants it to, and can provide valuable insight into how avalanches start at various slope inclinations.