Valentine's Day 2019 Mt Shasta Avalanche

[2_1_3]

We had fun examining the V-Day Avalanche Gulch slide on Mt. Shasta last year as part of a bigger effort to explore how various observational networks and models in California can "paint the picture" of an extreme storm. Avalanches have unique seismic signals and we used the network on Mt Shasta to precisely time the avalanche.

Read the preprint of the submitted manuscript here

tl;dr: seismic instruments helped us nail down the timing of a big mo'fo'in natural slide and re-think what led to its triggering.



Mike Hupp shot some great photos of the aftermath

[2_1_3]

Hot off the press in the American Geophysical Union's Earth and Space Sciences journal:

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley....9/2020EA001129

I think the important avalanche point made is that the rise in snowline/warming did not correspond to the triggering time of the Avy Gulch slide. Rain-on-snow and warm, windy conditions at lower elevations likely played a role in facilitating snowpack instability via free water introduction and subsequent failures and entrainment, but rapid loading (postulated to result from the wind direction shift) may have been a key mechanism in the triggering of the initial slide.

[homemadesalsa]

Cool. I love this stuff. Thanks for posting. Send it to me at TAR if you have a populist version.

[Sutter]

I haven't read an academic paper in some time, so I had to really slow my reading down to unpack a lot of the language. However, the data about economic impacts of these major AR events is wild. Thanks for sharing. Who is the intended audience for a paper like this?