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Warwick Payten, a Sydney scientist, knows what it is like to cheat
an avalanche. When he was climbing on Makalu, the world's fifth-highest
peak, in Nepal, the snow began to slip from under him. He was lucky.
"The fracture only happened a couple of feet above me. I sort of
ran on the spot and the slab went off down the hill," he recalls
of the 1993 mishap.
 Probe
could save lives
To help prevent some of the 150 deaths worldwide a year in avalanches,
Dr Payten, a materials engineer at the Australian Nuclear Science
and Technology Organisation, has helped develop a special lightweight
probe and pocket computer to test for snow conditions that could
result in a slip. The work was carried out in his spare time with
an adventurer, Roddy Mackenzie, who runs helicopter skiing holidays
in the Himalayas, and a retired ANSTO physicist, Dr John Tendys.
Dr Payten, who has been skiing since the age of four, said that
at present mountaineers or off-piste skiers had to take a shovel
and dig a deep pit and then crudely estimate the snow's stiffness
with their hands. Snow was considered weak if a gloved fist could
be punched into it with moderate ease. The hardness scale rose according
to the ease with which four fingers, a single finger, a pencil or
a knife, could be inserted.
Speedy analysis
"You're looking for conditions where hard snow is over weak snow,"
Dr Payten said. Cutting a pit could take up to 40 minutes, while
it only took two minutes to get a more accurate result from the
probe, which has electronic sensors at the end to measure snow strength
and temperature as it is pushed in, he said.
People could ski around the top of the slope taking several measurements
that would provide an objective two- or three-dimensional image
of the snow structure. The five-metre long device, which weighs
1.2 kilograms, could be carried in a backpack.
Many potential uses
Mr Mackenzie presented results of tests of the $US4000 ($5800) probe
at the International Symposium on Snow Monitoring and Avalanches
in India. The only other avalanche-predicting technology available
was a $US30,000 Swiss and American device, which was six times heavier
and required an electric motor to drive it into the snow, Dr Payten
said.
The probe needs more development, but universities studying avalanches
have begun to use them, and it is hoped they will one day be sold
to ski resorts, adventure tour operators and highway authorities
in snow countries. Dr Payten said "there's nothing quite like" skiing
off-piste.
[Source: smh.com.au]
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