Growing Snow to Help Predict Avalanches
Inside the Landslide MSU/Kelly Gorham Ed Adams, an engineering professor at Montana State University, used to study avalanches from inside a fortified shack. He would attach his shack to a boulder on a mountain, set small explosives in the snowpack, and trigger an avalanche, surrounding the shack. "Once snow gets on the ground, it's in an ongoing state of change," Adams says. That changeability makes the snowpack dangerously unpredictable. Scientists such as Adams know a lot about avalanches in general but very little about their inner workings. Adams has since moved from his shack into the Subzero Research Facility at Montana State, where he now studies snow by growing it in "cold rooms" (about -5°F). In the room, he blows air over a small water reservoir that he keeps at 65°. He then channels water vapor up a chimney and into a cat's cradle of strings, where the vapor crystallizes. When he...