What are avalanches? Avalanches are a large mass of snow, ice, soil or rock, which detaches from a mountain slope and slides or falls suddenly downward. Avalanches are one of the most awesome natural disasters on earth. They have the force to move building off their foundations if they are in the way of the snow. Power like that is crazy especially from just snow! An avalanche can be specifically defined as a mass movement hazard for the obvious reason, that the movement is hazardous part to us humans.

What are the two types of avalanches? One type is the slab avalanche. The slab is a slab of cohesive layer of snow that has not bonded to the other layers. It is triggered by stress because it can not support its own weight on the slope, and when the stress is exceeded it releases the slab like a window shattering. The slab slides down on what is called graupel, a small pellet like snow formation. The graupel works as ball barring for the slab to slide on, the graupel allows the snow to rea

ry to swim out of it like they say you are supposed to do. But I really don't know what I would do." How do you avoid being caught in an avalanche when you go snowmobiling in the mountains? " When we go up there we get the forecast the night before for the next day. We also check out the snow in the area we will be riding and, we just try to avoid any area that looks hazardous to us."

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Another way to control an avalanche is by explosives. There are several types of explosives that can be used for "avalanche blasting" Each thing has something different to offer in terms of performance, safety, storage, handling, and cost. When dealing with the explosives there are detonation speed and depth. These are main factors because you want the explosion to go off fast and get deep in to the snow so that it will take a large portion out and make the slopes safer. When the explosion is set off real fast it creates stress waves. The waves are what really cause the snow to get moving. The wave move through the snow, which then creates cracks in the snow and sends it on its way down the mountain.

Another type of an avalanche is the surface or loose snow avalanche. This type of avalanche is started on the surface and just keeps sliding down picking up speed and more snow burying things in its way. The surface avalanche looks like an upside down V when it is in motion. The surface avalanche is not as bad as a slab avalanche because it does not have the large slabs of hard ice and snow sliding on top crashing though things, but do not think it is not bad, but this is the kind of avalanche that entraps many skiers and holds them to their death.

People are another factor in causing avalanches. How you may ask, well one way is that we are very loud creatures we can really do nothing with out making much noise. So the noise we make will cause an avalanche to start. Another we cause avalanches are by then we ski or snowboard down the slopes we will make large cuts to turn and those cuts lots of times are very deep and break away from the rest of the slab and will start to slide. Snowmobilers can also cause an avalanche. The machines are loud and cut deep in to the snow, breaking up large slabs of snow at a time. This would be a problem because they are maki

Some common words found in the essay are:
, Randy Kaiser, Graupel Rounded, slab avalanche, snow pack, snow avalanche, avalanche activity, underneath snow, caught avalanche, cause avalanche, surface avalanche, stress snow, factor causing avalanches, avalanches occur,
Approximate Word count = 1573
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)