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The Avalanche Report Hello! This is Yanal and Andrew live from channel 6 news. Today we have some horrible and devastating news, on both parts of the world. On the coast of Australia a huge tsunami has hit, wiping out half of Australia and killing 3 quarter of the residents in all of Australia. While in the U.S.A the biggest avalanche in the history of the United States ort has just hit Washington, devastating the whole country. First Andrew will be explaining everything on tsunamis and how they occur. Then I will be explaining everything on avalanches. Now we will go to Andrew and hear his research. As you all know a huge avalanche has just hit Washington D.C, killing around 150 people, and leaving 100 in hospitals. This avalanche occurred in the Cascade Mountains, it had been snowing very hard for the past 3 days. Roads were blocked and many railway tracks were smothered in snow, leaving all train tracks closed. Mean while snow kept on piling up high on the mountain above Willington. The situation was even worse then it looked, because of the stupidity of the railroad crews about avalanches. They had clear-cut the forest on the slope, above the town for fuel. Now huge amounts of snow was pilled up above Willington, with nothing to help slow the avalanche. The next day sleet and rain started to fall. Then late that night during a storm, a huge slab half a mile wide broke off the mountain slopes. According to survivors.” It was like a whit death falling from the heavens. It advanced down, rumbling, exploding and grinding it zoomed down crashing buildings and water towers. Survivors dug wildly in the falling rain, and rescued 25 people. But not everybody was lucky as 450 people died. It’s just scary that just 1 avalanche caused this much devastation. Now that we have heard the heartbreaking news, it is now time for everyone that’s watching to know everything on avalanches from how they occur, why they occur, or how may forms of avalanches there are. Let’s start with what causes an avalanche. For many centuries and in many religions people have thought that witches, wizards and angry demons were behind the avalanche. A trial in Switzerland in 1625 concluded in the thought that a witch summoned an avalanche and set it loose, which caused a woman to be killed because she was suspected to have been a witch. Beginning in the 20century people started to take a scientific approach to the cause of avalanches. They have determined that avalanches are a creation of heavy snowfall, steeply angled slopes and instability between snow particles. CAUSES OF AVALANCHES The first of the requirements heavy snowfall seems to be very obvious, however avalanches would not occur so often if mountains had the same snow conditions as anywhere else in the world. This happens because some heavy clouds that are unable to rise up above the mountains get stuck and the snow falls directly on the mountains, and slowly as the snow piles up it will become unstable and cause an avalanche. The second of the requirement is steep slopes, which is also pretty obvious because if you were to put 80 feet deep blanket of snow on a flat mountain, it would be almost impossible for an avalanche to occur. However this doesn’t mean that you need a very steep hill, in fact 98% of avalanches occur on slopes with 25 to 50 degree slopes! The most common degree is 35. The third and last of the requirements is instability between snow particles. Stability is the attraction of the snow particles. When the stability is strong the snow particles stay together, but when the stability is weak avalanches start to occur. There are around 10 million snowflakes in a cubic foot of snow, which tells you that the snowflakes are really small. The attraction of these snowflakes continues to change as the lie on the ground. The unstable types of snow that are most likely to break are fluffy snow, sun crusted snow, depth sugar snow and surface sugar snow.
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