Ologies with Alie Ward - Snow Hydrology (SNOW & AVALANCHES) with Ned Bair

Episode Date: January 15, 2019

It's tiny! It's beautiful! It's cold! It can kill you. Snow and avalanche expert Dr. Ned Bair meets up on a bench during a layover to chat about the beauty of snowflakes, the best ammo for snowball fights, firing cannons at mountainsides, avalanche flam-flam, the dangers of snow patrolling, a lifesaving goat-antelope, the best and worst ski movies and a mentor that changed his life. Also: bomb cyclones and some tips on excavating your car. Or just staying inside.More on Dr. Ned Bair's workThis week's donation was made to ESAvalanche.orgSponsor links: www.kiwico.com/ologies, www.thegreatcourses.com/ologies, www.linkedin.com/ologiesMore links at www.alieward.com/ologies/snowhydrologyBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter or InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter or InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray Morris & Jarret SleeperTheme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's that blueberry bagel that tastes like onions because it pressed its face into an everything bagel. Allie Ward, back with another episode of Allergies. It's the middle of January and here in the Northern Hemisphere, lips are chapped, feet are cold, parkas are on. I'm here to give you a snow job. But first, thank you to everyone who supports on Patreon and who gets merch, including the new black T-shirts at olergiesmerch.com.

And of course, thanks to everyone who rates and subscribes, who leaves reviews on iTunes. You know I read them. You know I read them. For example, this week, thank you to Evie, who said, in the hopes of Allie noticing me, hey, I got to say that this podcast just recently got me through some pretty bad flying anxiety. So thank you. Thank you for taking me into the sky with you, Evie. Also EvanDK, I hope you and your pops are feeling okay.

Okay, so snow. Snow? Not just snow, but big, cold, crumbly, scary, dangerous avalanches. What the hell are they? So I searched far and wide for a snow expert and I connected with a dude who got his PhD in environmental science and management from the University of California, Santa Barbara, a place Stephen Ray Morris and I both attended. But this guy is primarily based up near Mammoth Mountain, which is technically a giant lava

dome complex, frickin' volcano near Yosemite. He does not live in LA because, hello, there's no snow here. But he would be passing through LAX on a six-hour layover. I coincidentally was also flying into LAX that night. So we had plans to meet up in a terminal and then my flight was delayed because of snow. It's cute, snow. Cute. So we made another plan.

He had another layover at LAX a few weeks later, right before the holidays, and I drove down there and I waited on a bench outside LAX for him with my Zoom a-rolling to Rendezvous at high noon and talk snow. One issue, my phone was dying and LAX was huge. Some days I'm like, why am I such a garbage? Also just a little audio note. So as mentioned, this was recorded on a bench at LAX and so there were a lot of ambient noises that we were competing with and so it's not to be annoying.

We tried to cut around them as best we could, but it's a little bit less smooth than most episodes. So if this is the very, very first episode you're ever listening to, the audio is a little different on this one. Please bear with us. Forgive us. The content's totally worth it. As you're going to hear, it was an adventure and you're about to learn about the beauty

and architecture of snowflakes, why they're so bright white, what to do if you're stranded in snow, how avalanches happen, how to survive one, digging out your car 101, and the best snow for a snowball fight. Also how climate change affects snowpack and the really riveting backstory of skier, avalanche expert and snow hydrologist Dr. Ned Baer. I thought that was Ned, that wasn't Ned. My phone is at 2%, I'm at the appointed meeting place, it is 11.59, I do not see Ned. My phone has 2% for us to meet up with each other before this gets real tragic.

Oh god. How was it not plugged in? My lord. My phone is now at 1%. I see someone walking. Please be Ned, please be Ned. Are you Ned? Yes!

Hi Ned. And where did you grow up? Because you're based in Santa Barbara, or you work out of UCSB? I do, I work for UCSB, yep, I live in Mammoth Lakes. And where are you from originally? Alexandria, Virginia. Do they have snow there? No.

Oh! Not much. Well, how did this happen? Yeah, I grew up skiing in Wintergreen, Virginia, 1000 vertical feet, something like 30 inches of annual snowfall. I went to school in Maine, I went to Bowdoin College and skied more there. And then after college, I went and my parents weren't too happy about this and became a ski patroller and did that for 10 years.

Were they like, can you not break all of your bones? Yeah, well, that's not really what they wanted me to get a college to do. And yeah, it's not the safest job either. But I loved it, I mean, it's a great experience. Have you been called a ski bum by your family? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've always had that. I've wanted to live in a ski town for as long as I can remember.

And so I've sort of managed to do that with a professional career. I might have traveled in a fair bit, but also just a lot of time on the computer. How did you make the leap from being ski patrol for, you said, 10 years to, do you have a PhD in snow hydrology? Yes. How did you go from like, you know, air quotes ski bum to Dr. Snow, dude? So it's kind of a long story, but I was working as a patroller and my second. Part of that was I was doing my PhD while I was still ski patrolling at the end.

But I had a friend on ski patrol who is sort of a mentor for me. His name was Walter Rosenthal. He was he was an old patroller is in his mid fifties. And he he kind of took me under his wing and taught me a lot about snow and digging these massive snow pits, you know, like three Sierra snowpack. This is really deep, at least in the good. It varies, but it can be very deep. And so we would be digging these pits and doing these, you know, crystal

identification and stuff like that. I mean, really deep. And he just it was a really he loved it. I mean, he was a guy. He's probably one of the only people I've ever met. And I think like to dig more in the snow and do anything else. So it's kind of like a human backhoe. And and and anyway, so Walter was my my friend on ski patrol

and he taught me a lot about the snow and I was patrolling. And I was kind of looking for something a little more cerebral to do. You know, I loved working as a ski patroller. I should say this Walter had a history. He was a scientist also also worked at UC Santa Barbara. And he had done a bunch of work with remote sensing and. Satellite based mapping of the snowpack and stuff that I'm doing now. But what he really liked to do is avalanche research,

which there's there's almost no funding for in the U.S. really. It's what I like to do. It's what I wrote my dissertation on. Right. And so anyway, Walter got an NSF grant with his advisor, Jeff Dozier, to study centering mechanisms in the snowpack. So like how snow grains bond together. He was looking at soluble impurities in the snowpack and using a scanning electron microscope and looking at the geometric structure

and how the next form between them and stuff like that. Anyway, Walter just got this NSF grant. And then in April of 2006, he was killed with three other ski patrollers. One of volcanic event on Mammoth Mountain collapsed. Oh, my God. Yeah. And it was it was it was a really rough time. It actually it happened right next to me. I was there when it happened.

And he he was actually killed trying to rescue the other patrollers. So it was really. Yeah, it was a tough, a tough time in my life, not an experience that I, you know, had a really hard time getting over. But anyway, Walter's advisor, Jeff came to me and asked me if I wanted to go to grad school on his this NSF grant. Wow. No longer had a PhD student to do the research. What an impact that must have had on you.

It did. It had a pretty big impact on me. After college, I was a ski patroller and I was a climbing guide and I was kind of a climbing bum, ski bum. And I pretty soon after that got married and, you know, I started living, not living out of my truck as much anyway. And yeah, now I have two little kids and it was a tough experience. I guess I should mention

so James Juarez and Scott McCandrews were the two other patrollers who were killed. Well, fencing off the area from skiers, Scotty and James fell through the snow 20 feet into the volcanic vent and Walter, who wasn't supposed to be working, but had returned because of the storm, went after Scotty and James to save them. All three died of asphyxiation in the volcanic gases, namely the heavier CO2. Several others were injured in the rescue efforts. And I just learned that when volcanic gases reach noxious strengths,

they're called a mozuku, which in Swahili means an evil wind. It's dangerous. So if you ever ski at Mammoth Mountain, there's a thing called a fumarole that's on the chair three area and it's spews out volcanic gases, hydrogen sulfide, which is really toxic, lots of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide. And it's sort of fine if it's not capped over, if it's open and it's venting. But this year was a really large snow year. This was April of 2006.

And so it actually capped over for the first time that a lot of people who'd been there for decades could remember. And and so these gases sort of just sat there and actually formed like an underground chamber. Oh, I don't really know. And snow bridge collapsed and yeah, we're pulling up fencing because there's like fencing to keep skiers out of the fumarole. There are tons of videos on YouTube of skiers and snowboarders stopping at this fenced off plume to just wonder at it and many pay their respects.

And a stone memorial is up at Mammoth Summit to remember the three and even 10 years after the incident, hundreds gathered at Mammoth to observe the anniversary. The community is still pretty rocked by it. And so did you have a hard time because it was maybe such a visceral and traumatic experience to go back to this kind of science or did it make you more passionate about kind of the safety of it? I think both. I don't know. It's sort of a complicated question.

I I don't know. I wasn't going to change my life radically and, you know, go off and live in a city and do that. I wouldn't have been happy doing that. But yeah, it certainly made me think a lot about the mountains and taking risks. This snow bridge collapsed right next to me. It was a couple of feet away. So very easily than me falling in for the fumarole.

So wow. Yeah. And you're a young person, too. Yeah, yeah, I was one of those that I was 26. Yeah. Yeah. And so what is it about snow that you that you love? Why what keeps bringing you back to it? Well, you know, growing up, it was always sort of an ephemeral thing and I didn't get to see it very much.

And I think I think all kids, you know, love snow. It's obviously, you know, no school and at least in the D.C. area. So it has nice early memories and impressions for me, I think later on. Well, I love the avalanche part of it. I think the avalanche world is fascinating and there are a lot of avenues that haven't been explored scientifically. So I know this is where I found out what ski patrolling means.

I honestly, I thought it was just like buzzing around the slopes, kind of making sure everyone was OK, kind of like a lifeguard, but with no speedos and more skis. Turns out I did not know anything about ski patrolling. You go out with explosives and you set off avalanches and throw dynamite out of your hand. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I thought you were just making sure no one bailed.

No, no, no, no, no. You do active avalanche control. Yeah, so you shoot how it serves and oh my God, throw dynamite. And so it's it's fun. How it's served, by the way, is a frigging World War Two cannon, you guys. It's a cannon. I had to look it up. You know, these avalanches are very difficult to predict and it's not always so clear

what causes a really large one versus a small one. And, you know, they're just sort of spectacular, too. I mean, just the size of the debris in the large blocks and damage, you know, that they can cause. And you can see all kinds of markings on, you know, mostly in the Sierra and most of the United States, most of these happen in wilderness areas so that the marking, you know, it's trees that are destroyed. Not like in the Alps or those more infrastructure.

They have a lot of history with damaged buildings. And things like that. This is no joke. Each year around 100 people are killed by alpine avalanches. But due to really crazy snowfall lately, 26 lives have been lost just this past month. Just a few days ago, two ski patrollers in France were killed detonating explosives to trigger an avalanche.

So the shit is risky. Who are there? How many avalanches are there in Mammoth per year? Do you think in Mammoth? I don't know, a couple thousand. Really? Oh, my God, I had no idea. Yeah, I mean, because, you know, when they're triggered like that, you have a lot more of them throughout the U.S., I don't know,

100,000 a year or something like that. What's the what's the death toll there? Well, it's been going down. It's in sort of the mid 20s. It's actually been sort of staying steady or going down, which is is probably due to a number of factors, airbags, better education, better awareness. The avalanche centers do a great job with warning people

during those high snowfall periods and other times when, you know, the metamorphism has produced layering that's unstable. Wow. OK, more on those airbags in a bit. As for avalanches, these metamorphisms in layering just mean that there's less stability with a snow shelf depending on what kind of layers are underneath it. So maybe some wetter, warmer snow or a layer of refrozen ice kind of stacking and stacking, kind of like an icy club sandwich.

So a steep slope, heavy snow cover, a weak layer in the snow, plus some kind of trigger and you have a slide that can vary from pretty harmless size one to a size two that can bury a person, a three can bury a car and a four can destroy structures and go up to 80 miles an hour within a few seconds, which is about twice as fast as my 2007 Prius. And this deserves much more respect. So, yeah, they're exciting.

But then also just snow is a really fascinating material. As Walter always used to say, snow is hot, which means that it's very close to its melting temperature almost everywhere on Earth. Oh, wow. You know, because Earth's pretty warm compared to like the rest of the. Planets in our solar system. And well, at least the ones past Earth. Going back to a really basic question, what is snow?

What's the deal with snowflakes? Are they all unique? Like, if I know nothing about snow, what are the basics? I know this is a stupid question, but I don't care. My advisor, Jeff Dozier, he had a thing where he went to Disney for the Frozen movie. They had some consulting, consulting work where he showed up

and gave us pointers on snowflakes, which I thought were pretty good. And actually, and Karl Birkeland, who's actually also on my PhD committee and I thought between them, they had some pretty good points. Are you ready for this beautiful, icy point? It's going to melt your brains. Jeff made the point that snowflakes, you know, they grow by accretion, meaning that there's like condensation, nuclear dust. They grow out of that.

So you can't have ones with holes in the middle, which you see a lot, especially around now when people are making snowflake decorations for Christmas. So no holes in the middle. They have to have six sides. OK, no pentagons or, you know, anything like that, right? They go from six sided hexagonal water crystals. So if a kindergartner is out there making a paper snowflake with a hole in the middle, definitely yell at them.

Just mercilessly because, frankly, they're never going to learn otherwise. Humiliate them. Don't do that. Also, for a four second lesson on hexagonal water crystals, it has this. So water is two hydrogens and an oxygen atom. And because of how much molecules slow down in the cold, the hydrogen bonds allow the water molecules to link up in such a way that they form a hexagonal lattice structure, which is, of course, why some snowflakes have six sides.

OK, what else did the scientists tell the mouse at Disney? So Carl also made the point that you cannot yell and cause a snow avalanche. OK, it doesn't happen. Like, I guess it happened in the movie Heidi. OK, I just spent like an hour digging all over for this Heidi clip. But he may have been thinking of another mountain movie, which, incidentally, an I Love Lucy episode cited. Now, don't make a sound.

What's the matter, honey? All that snow hanging over our heads allowed noise to cause an avalanche. It's true. I read it in a book and you remember that picture? Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Yeah, that's right. Somebody shot a pistol and it caused a great big avalanche. Yeah. Now, don't anybody move.

OK, also, I went and looked up Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. And from what I can gather, it involves a bunch of related horny frontiersmen who romantically straight up kidnap women. So I feel like, yes, this pistol triggering an avalanche plot point is problematic, but not as much as it's kind of a white hearted musical take on human trafficking. I guess you want to try and stop that urban rural legend from perpetuating.

So that's a big debunker of flim flam. That's flim flam. You can't scream and cause an avalanche. No. OK, so scream your head off in the mountains if you need to. Yes. OK, good to know. Sometimes that's why you go to the mountains. It's just to scream your head off. Yeah. And then you go back and you say, everything's fine.

Yeah, right. So OK, snow. Where does snow form in the atmosphere? Does it form right above our heads? Does it form way above us? Like, where? When does when does a snowflake become a snowflake? Yeah, pretty high up. I mean, it depends on the level of the clouds and, you know, how deep the storm is and where the moisture is. But yeah, I mean, this is all the lower atmosphere

if you're an atmospheric scientist. But for people like me who study what's going on in the ground, a pretty high up kilometers above our heads. And it starts off frozen, actually, because it's cold up there. But it turns to rain if it's not cold enough. So to recap, water vapor in cold temperatures turns to ice crystals around a piece of dust or pollen, a.k.a. condensation nuclei, and then it falls through the air and tumbles and grows.

And in warmer air, it'll melt a little at the edges and form clumps with other flakes resulting in heavier, wet, fluffy snow. And if it falls through colder air, it's less likely to stick together and it falls a smaller, drier and powdery snow. Also, side note, I just went down some YouTube polls trying to see different size snowflakes. And one thing I didn't need to know about was a video of a guy silently scratching dandruff, which, quote, falls like snow

and has 40,000 views, mine now being one of them. Human beings were all a little different and to each their own snowflakes being unique, yes or no? Yes, you can find snowflakes that are pretty similar. OK. You know, but they all grow by this pretty complex accretion process where there's just a lot of water vapor condensing. It's called deposition when it's going straight from vapor to solid like that. But I think usually what people are referring to,

and I think when they talk about, you know, how no two snowflakes are alike is that the weather is kind of constantly changing, right? And so that causes a difference in the the crystal habits, they call them, that are coming out of the sky. Wilson Bentley is taking pictures of snowflakes, I think, over 100 years ago or around 100 in Vermont. And there's been all sorts of people photographing snowflakes. Wilson Bentley of Vermont, by the by, was a pioneer in the fields

of teeny tiny weather photography and snapped his first snowflake picture in the late 1880s by attaching a camera to a microscope. And he famously was the one that argued that no two snow crystals were alike. And then he died at the age of 66 after walking six miles in the blizzard. Oh, man, snow is a bitchy mistress. But what makes all of these glimmering icy flakes so fancy? It has to do with the temperature and the super saturation, so like relative humidity, you get sort of a different snowflake

form and they can be anything from, you know, dendrites, like the classic snowflake to like needles to capped columns to there's a number of different sector plates. I didn't know that. Ken Librecht has a nice book of like a coffee table book of snowflakes. OK, so Ken Librecht is a Caltech physics professor who is probably the world's best snowflake photographer. Like he can say hands down, it's him.

Now, among his many books are snowflakes, Winter's Frozen Artistry and Ken Librecht's Field Guide to Snowflakes. If you're like, yes, I'm ordering those right now. But, Allie Ward, I need to see photographs immediately before my books are delivered. I understand. And I direct you toward his website, snowcrystals.com, which also lays out all the different types of snowflakes, such as stellar dendrites, which sounds like a European electronic band.

But they're actually the classic pretty star shaped ones. And then there's capped columns, which are snowflakes that look like a hand weight from the gym or like a tiny, tiny icy tie fighter. And then there's this shimmering diamond dust crystals. There are triangular snowflakes. So looking through the gallery, one can't help but say snowflakes. I have no idea. Yeah. Are you ever.

Irked by people using the term snowflake politically as an insult. You know, I haven't thought about that, you know, it doesn't bother me. I mean, I guess, you know, it makes sense, right? I mean, it's a funny question. Like the classic snowflake that we were talking about, the dendrite, right? Those are delicate and they do fracture and break apart easily. Not that's not so much the case in the Sierra, for instance, or most mountain ranges where it's windy, the snow that falls there.

Well, for one thing, it's not really falling. It's usually coming sideways because the winds are so strong. There's a process called fragmentation by the wind where the crystals are just mechanically blown apart. Oh, wow. So like they might start off, you know, in the clouds as nice dendrites. But by the time they get to the surface, they're blown apart. Kind of like how at the beginning of the night, you might be perfectly orderly,

just a complex and symmetrical vision. But then maybe it's 1 a.m. and one shoe broke and an eyelash fell off. And you got redeposited at a diner instead of a disco, if you will. So yeah, it's no place. They can actually be pretty durable and they look different. Like those ones are, you know, they're small. They're like little specks, you know, versus larger. You know, all snowflakes probably look small to people.

But they some are much, much smaller, you know, like in order of magnitude, smaller, especially when they're disaggregated like that. And then what's happening with a hailstone? What's the difference there? So a hailstone is something that's liquid. But then because of updraft, it comes back up and is re-frozen. And there's a lot of turbulence and yeah. Wow. So it's a raindrop.

It almost hits the ground and then it's like, nope, I head up to the clouds. Yeah. Hailstorms I just learned are different from grapple, which is when super cooled water forms around a snowflake and it looks like hail. But it's not kind of like a ball of ice made up of tiny balls of ice encasing symmetrical ice crystals that formed around a speck of something. It's just layers and layers of drama. So and then at the center of each snowflake, is there a speck of dust? There's some kind of condensation, nuclei could be like salt.

But yeah, it's basically dust for the most part. And then let's get back a little bit to your patrol days and avalanches. And so what is causing an avalanche? How much snowpack do you have to have to cause an avalanche? And what is it essentially? Is it a shelf of snow that just slips off a mountain? That was an avalanche of questions. I'm sorry. Ground is pretty much always right around freezing.

So, you know, zero centigrade, 32 Fahrenheit. But the snow surface can really vary. In fact, right at the surface is where all the radiative transfer takes place so that it can get really cold. You're like, quick, let me look at your notes on radiative transfer. But I got to admit, dawg, I just copied these off Wikipedia's test. But OK, radiative transfer is the physical phenomenon of energy transfer in the form of electromagnetic radiation.

So the surface of the snow can melt and then get very cold again. I think that's what that means. That can grow different crystals. So that's where you can get snow that changes once it's on the ground. It becomes weaker because of the metamorphic process. And there's all kinds of different ones. And also new snow is just it's much weaker than older snow.

Typically. And so if you want to steep enough slope, it can avalanche. But there's a lot to the avalanche. It has to form a slab, which is like a sort of cohesive like a shelf, like you're talking about. Yeah, that that is much more dangerous than you can also have avalanches that are more like something you'd see on a sand pile. It's like a slough. And that's where it's not so well stuck together.

Snow is just inherently like a lot of geologic materials. It's a layered medium, right? Depending on what happened with the weather and how it fell and all that, it has different layers and they can have different strengths. If you get that the correct layer and you do have the block or shelf that slides downhill and then, you know, the slope angle matters. So what causes most avalanches, if not people screaming at them? Well, new snow.

I mean, this goes back to Monty Atwater in the 50s. There's 10 contributory factors. OK, so side note, Montgomery Atwater of Alta, Colorado is the granddaddy of avalanche research. He is the dude. He's also the first one who thought, well, holy hell, shit, let's launch small missiles at a mountain to make controlled avalanches happen. Everyone's like, Monty, dope idea. Now, his was not a work I was familiar with,

but among the 10 contributory factors are things like old snow depth, new snow depth, slope angle, temperature and Atwater's work has now become like avalanche 101, like the no-doy of icing on ours. We've known this for a long time. It's when you have new snow, especially a lot of new snow, it stresses the snow back. That's when you get avalanches. There's other things, you know, skiers. I mean, it's stress really is what it is.

Skiers can exert stress through what's called a stress ball. They're affecting this week layers. But yeah, the avalanche hazard really goes up with a lot of new snow. Oof. And so tell me a little bit about your work blowing up these shelves of ice. So so when I was a ski patroller and ski patrollers all across the country and all across the world do this every time it snows and, you know, a significant amount

in big ski resorts in the Western U.S. and the Alps all over, they they throw explosives at the snow pack to trigger avalanches so that they don't come down on the gas or skiing there. And it's very much an old fashioned cowboy way of controlling the hazard because you like these sticks of dynamite in your hand or a lot of places. Maybe I still use dynamite, but a lot of places use some kind of cast primer. But, you know, anyway, it's a high explosive and and throw it at the, you know, and then watch it go off and see what happens.

And a lot of time nothing happens. But oh, my God, what does that sound like? The whole shebang. Oh, it's very loud. Yeah. And you want to watch out and not damage that, you know, make sure that you you try to cover your ears as well as you can. But of course, you need, you know, to be able to talk on the radio and stuff like that. So it's hard to totally keep your ears plugged all the time. What does an avalanche sound like itself?

Yeah, I get that question a lot. Usually they're silent. What? Yeah. I mean, so I've talked about this with other people who've seen bigger avalanches than I have, and they say that you can hear them when they're really big, especially a lot of times with like when they're breaking stuff, you hear the stuff that they're breaking like trees. There's there's a lot of friction being, you know, down frictional heating and stuff with these massive avalanches.

But yeah, like most avalanches, there's size scale like one to five, say for destructive size. And, you know, most of the avalanches I've seen or destructive size three, maybe two, two to three and pretty silent. Oh, my gosh. And then have you ever triggered one that surprised you that was like, oh, that was bigger than I thought. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got caught in a couple of them as a ski patroller.

And it's just one of the, you know, hazards at the job. I think a lot of the public don't know what sort of risks ski patrollers are suggesting themselves to to get that mountain open. You know, it can be really dangerous because for one thing after done with the explosives, a lot of the slopes will be ski cut. PS, I did have to look up what ski cutting is. And it's when a ski patroller intentionally skis across a dangerous pocket to maybe start an avalanche, a.k.a.

an actual nightmare. They do actual nightmares. Did I mention they're not just like hanging out in case you need a bandaid to clean up? And there's some places you don't want to ski cut and you won't ski cut. But sometimes there's just little pockets that have to be dealt with. There's sort of a systematic process for doing that. But it means you're, you know, an exposed, you can you can be really exposed. And that that's how I've gotten caught in the few avalanches

that I've been in has always been ski cutting. Did you dig your way out? You know, I didn't get fully buried. So mostly just went for a ride, you know, a couple hundred feet, like buried up to my waist, that kind of thing. Oh, man. Yeah. But, you know, I'd never got hurt in an avalanche. That was just like a Tuesday at the office for you.

I guess. Yeah. It's a hard thing with the ski cutting. You know, it's it's kind of a controversial practice. But, you know, if you really think about it, it's it's it's something that you can't get away from as a ski patroller. I mean, there's certain areas you're always going to have to ski cut. So. Oh, man. What do you do to warm up when you've done this?

Is it is a part of working in snow that involves going to a lodge and drinking cocoa or is that just a fantasy that I have? Yeah. Well, it depends on where you are. I mean, when I was ski patrolling, there's ski patrol shacks where you sit bump, which means you wait for like someone to get hurt. And then you, you know, and you try to keep one or two people up there at all time so that someone because you want to go downhill to get people. When you're out in the field for some of these, you know, like

doing snow research, like, for instance, I'm involved in this NASA snow X experiment, which is a large field campaign for validating some instruments that will be flown on on planes. You know, if you're in that wilderness sort of a setting, yeah, there's nowhere to go. So you just try to really bring a lot of warm clothes and move. I mean, moving around is really the best thing you can do. It's really cold, but sometimes it just sucks.

Like you're just really cold and, you know, you bring extra cold, like, especially when you're doing a lot of snow pit work, your gloves get, like, even if they're, you know, whatever the best cortex gloves you can get are, they get soaking wet. So, you know, wearing multiple pairs of gloves and switch them. And, and yeah, sometimes it's just cold and miserable. And that's just, you know, my hands get cold. I'm not sure they get especially cold, but I'm definitely not.

I definitely have problems with that and it can be no fun sometimes. You can be freezing cold in some pretty cool places, I guess. Right. I guess that's what you're trying to do. I guess I should. And it's cool as a poor choice of the word. There's a lot of beauty, I guess, that makes up for it. And what is the research that you're doing right now focus on? OK, so what I do now is I do a large scale hydrologic and remote sensing work. So I'm doing snowpack estimates across large areas

and concentrating in high mountain Asia in, particularly in the Western parts of high mountain Asia, like Afghanistan and Pakistan, the upper Indus River, which is a huge source of drinking water, particularly like Afghanistan. And a lot of the upper Indus, it shares sort of climatological similarities with California and that it's kind of a wet winter and then a dry. It's more continental and it is different, but dry summer and it's not monsoon dominated. It's mostly water resources work to estimate

snowpack volumes because the snow, it sort of acts as a reservoir because it's frozen up there. And then if you're in a place like Afghanistan and California conveniently starts melting in the summer, which is the dry season. Yeah, feeds the rivers going back to the stuff about the spatial variability in the snowpack. It's it's a tough thing to figure out how much snow is up there. And the two big problems right are like, how much is up there and how fast is it going to melt? When's it going to melt?

But in a place like Afghanistan, there's no snowpack measurements to the rivers will just go dry in September. And it's a humanitarian crisis. And so we can we can kind of help out with that a little bit with remote sensing by giving an idea of what sort of runoff to expect based on how much snow is up there. And that can be really useful for humanitarian aid and lead lead times. And stupid question, favorite or least favorite movie about snow

or ice or avalanches, least favorite or favorite, whatever, whatever reaction to. Oh, I'm trying to remember the name of the movie, but it was really bad. It was Josh Hartnett was in it. And he got there's this guy who got lost off the back of Mammoth Mountain. OK, I looked into it and it was six degrees miracle on the mountain about a guy who loses his way. I think math is involved. And then it's like maybe I'll clear my head shredding on some fresh powder.

I said to get away for a few days. Enjoy the mountain there. Always do. Any who's a storm comes, but it's not just the winter that's harsh. This movie scored a 22 percent with critics on Rotten Tomatoes. I was not a big fan of this, this, this film went straight. I don't think it even made it to the theaters. It's not worth even remembering. This happened while I was patrolling.

They made a movie out of it. Yeah, there were wolves and then it's like, you know, there are no wolves and Mammoth and it was sort of this terrible. I mean, not to I think maybe a better filmmaker could have made the story more convincing anyway. But of course, my all time favorite movie is Aspen Extreme, which is a ski film from the mid 90s. Sorry about 100 guys, maybe to make it to spring.

OK, so Aspen Extreme from 1993 features cool dudes with borderline mullets and as fate would have it, it too scored a 22 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. It's just more formative for me when I saw it because I was younger and so. Inspiring, inspiring, perhaps. Yeah, yeah. So I I don't have, you know, those are the two that just just off the top of my I mean, there have been a lot of, you know, terrible ski movies that people love. So I guess that's one of mine.

OK, I have questions from listeners. Oh, OK, you ready? Sure. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors, why sponsors? You know what they do? They help us give money to a charity of our allergists choice, which this week is the Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center, ESAvalanche.org.

And it's a nonprofit that provides quality avalanche and snowpack information to folks in the Eastern Sierra Nevadas with the goal of helping them make better decisions while traveling in avalanche terrain. So saving lives. Now, it was founded by Ned's mentor, Walter Rosenthal, who lost his life rescuing others. Walter remains the president in memoriam. So thank you patrons and listeners for helping

all these contribute to that cause. Again, it's ESAvalanche.org. OK. OK. Your questions. All right. Listener questions. Let's have him. Here we go. Um, a lot of questions. People excited about snow. Oh, OK. So I'm just going to list these off.

Several people, Marissa Brewer, May Merrill and Juan Pedro Martinez wanted to know what makes the snow white. Oh, that's a good question. So the snow is white in visible wavelengths, because that's what we see in. It's actually wouldn't be. And if we could see into the, you know, near infrared, it actually gets really dark, which is one way you can figure out what you're looking at when you have a satellite or a spectrometer,

something that senses in multiple wavelengths, a multispectral instrument. But it's white just because snow has a very low, what's called the complex index of refraction. So it's very transparent. And what that means, actually, is that it tends to scatter. Light that comes into it instead of absorb it. OK, and absorbing is what makes something dark. Right. Right. The photons are coming in and they bounce around in a snowpack

and then come back out. And that's that's bright when you. White, because it's a bunch. All the wavelengths getting scattered back at you. So it doesn't absorb it well. That's right. In the visible wavelengths. Yeah. Got it. Exactly. There we go. Tons of people had avalanche questions, obviously,

and I will list them all in an aside because there's a lot of names. OK, they are Tony Benvenuti, Olaf Tatschke, Brooke Besson, Barbara Blackie, Grace Gonzalez, Henry Strong, Wendy Fick, Christopher Emperor, Danny Bocchizer, Greer Nelson, Dustin Parrish. Also, please remember, we're sitting on a bench outside an airport, so do enjoy the ambient sounds of a few trucks rumbling past. Also, his layover was almost up. Oh, and here's that info about airbags that I promised you earlier.

Jane Ennis essentially asked, what is the best way to survive an avalanche other than not being in one? So I think the avalanche airbags have been a revolution in protective personal protective equipment is what they call it, which, you know, for a ski patroller used to be like CPR mask and gloves and stuff. And now include helmets and avalanche airbags. Interesting story about it. The guy who invented the airbag system, ABS, was a German hunter

who had been in a couple avalanches one time. He had a chamois, which is like a little European deer. Oh, wow. Slung around his neck and he rode to the top of the avalanche and figured, hey, this works pretty well. And he thought it was a surface area thing. That's not quite right. It's an effect called inverse segregation, but it's the Brazil nut effect.

It's like shake a can of nuts and basically all the little nuts fill in the holes and make the big nut, the Brazil nuts rise to the top. And remember how ice floats in a glass? I also read that icy snow is less dense than your watery human body. And so you'll sink in it fast. So having a large light airbag, which kind of looks like a U shaped pillow, you'd use to take a nap on an airplane, but like four times as big can float you right up to the top of the slide.

So if you don't have an airbag, another way to survive an avalanche is just to try to move to the side of it as quickly as possible. And to struggle to get your head above the snow once the movement is slowing down. So you want to get your head up those first 15 minutes after an avalanche are critical. Now, another strategy is to just never go outside ever again, ever stay warm. Watch that 70 show on cable, even if you don't really like it or airbags. So so no, those are those are, I think, the biggest safety improvement that I've seen in my lifetime.

And I just keep with an airbag. It doesn't add too much weight, you know, it's like maybe four pounds extra or so in a pack. Did you say he had a deer around his neck? Yeah, a chamois. Is that a living deer? Dead one, because he's a hunter. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I was like, you just ski with one of these? No, no, no, he was just bringing it home, you know, got it.

OK, I was like, you just you just walk around with a live cute deer on you. OK, that makes more sense with a little or two. I don't know. I don't know too much about Shamuam. I'll look into it. PS, a chamois is a European goat antelope. Shamuam. And Mauer and Cynthia Barts both had igloo questions. How can an igloo keep you warm when it's made of tiny frozen water droplets?

Yeah. So snow is actually a great insulator because it's got a lot of air in it. So if you think about it, any material that has a lot of air and it can kind of work as a good insulator. I mean, it's like a straw bale or something like that. And so that's the idea, right? If you build up blocks like that and also they, you know, keep out the wind. And yeah, it's actually a pretty good insulator. That's why snow sticks around for so long.

Oh, because there's so much air in it. Well, it's a good insulator. I didn't know that. So if there were blocks of ice and igloo wouldn't be as warm, but the snow, because there's more air in the snow, that's true. Yeah, solid blocks of sea ice would not work as well. OK, although they would still provide shelter from the wind, which helps a lot. OK, also, side note, I just learned that igloo in some Inuit languages

can mean broadly a house or a home built out of any material. And that the snowhouse that's typically called an igloo actually has a much more specific name. And yes, linguists have studied a bunch of Arctic regional languages. And yep, there's a ton of words for different kinds of snow. The Sammy people of Northern Scandinavia and Russia, they got a thousand words just for reindeer. How boss is that?

Also, pardon the planes taking off. Did I mention that we recorded this on a bench outside of LAX? I feel like I did. OK, let's talk eating snow, which was asked by patrons Alisa Norman, Jason Steinhoff and M. Maurer. A lot of people had questions about eating snow. Kristen Long, in particular, asked as a child, I was never sure if it was OK to eat snow, obviously, not the yellow kind, or if it really was full of chemicals due to the smog and the atmosphere.

So does where you live make a difference on whether or not it's OK to eat snow? Yeah, it does. I mean, it's it's all that stuff in the atmosphere, the condensation, nuclei and all that stuff we're talking about. You know, you can definitely have impurities in the snowpack. And then we also you also get deposition from dust, for instance, on the snow, that's a big issue in the Western US. So that's once it's on the ground, but they get these big dust storms in southern Colorado and more of these

continental areas because we just have the ocean and most of the dust, like from China, it's not making it over here, but they have local sources of dust that they can trace and they get these apocalyptic looking dust storms. There's just other stuff, especially the older and longer that the snow has been there. It tends to get stuff on top, like like there's an algae that that grows on the snow, Clamidonus and Nevalis. That's no bueno. Yeah, I think is it a it's a fun.

No, it's an algae, I think. Anyway, it makes you sick if you eat too much of it. Side note, so I look this up and it's called watermelon snow because of this pink blush that the algal blooms cause. And it even smells like watermelon, but don't eat it. Now, of course, of course, just like snail. It's somehow popped up as an ingredient in way too expensive face serums, because I don't know, maybe a drop of snow algae juice will make me look younger.

So somebody loves me and I don't die alone. With my mini schnauzer left to devour my corpse. I think that's the thinking behind it. Anyway, so maybe don't. Now, what if you are kind of stranded like Jason Steinhoff asked, is it true that a stranded human cannot eat snow fast enough to stay properly hydrated? And Amour asked, is is eating snow actually dehydrated because you spend more energy melting the snow than you get from drinking the water?

Yeah, you're definitely better off melting it if you have fire or like a stove. I mean, that's that's pretty standard in most expeditions. You are, you know, getting it to go through that phase change. It does require a lot of energy. So it's not the most efficient way, but you are still getting the water. So yeah, if you're desperate, I mean, you can melt some of it. Yeah, it'll make you really cold. So what if you have nothing to melt snow with?

OK, I spent way too long on survivalist message boards. And apparently, if you have a canteen, you fill it up with snow and you tuck it between your layers of clothing and you let your body heat melt it. Let your body do it or you can suck on small amounts of snow at a time. Just don't eat ice like it's pudding. Also, one thread said you could pee in a bucket of snow and just melt it that way. So you wouldn't be eating yellow snow. I guess technically, at that point, it would be a beverage.

What's my point? Just bring a canteen or stay inside forever. A lot of questions about climate change. Madeleine Heising wanted to know I live in Boston last winter. We had a bomb cyclone storm that everyone was freaking out about. And she's embarrassed to say, I really don't know what that means. What is a bomb cyclone and who gets to make up these dramatic names? I don't know. I don't know what a bomb cyclone is.

Yeah, you got me there. It sounds bad. I think you'd want to talk to an atmospheric scientist about that one. Yeah, it doesn't sound good, though. OK, my friends, I look this up and a bomb cyclone is also known as explosive cyclogenesis, a weather bomb, meteorological bomb, explosive development, mid-latitude cyclone, cyclone bomb or bombogenesis or snowmageddon or a nor'easter. Now, if you're counting linguists, that is 10 English terms for just one kind of storm. And it means that the pressure drops a bunch, at least 24 millibars in a short amount of time, 24 hours.

It's when a mass of cold air meets warm air and the storm gathers intensity really quickly. But it ain't a blizzard unless the winds are at least 35 miles an hour. Visibility is reduced to a quarter mile or less, and this thing lasts at least three hours. And yes, climate change affects the amount of warm air that slams into cold air. Slightly warmer air can also hold more moisture. So we may be seeing shorter snow seasons, but heavier snow dumps because of that. So climate change, the unnatural earth puberty that nobody wants. In terms of fake snow, what are your feelings?

Jordan, Maryfield wants to know. What are your feelings on artificial snow made for ski resorts? You know, I think they really help these ski resorts. The artificial snow helps the ski resorts maintain a more consistent product, as they'd call it. I mean, Mammoth, they missed their opening day by one day this year for the first time since they'd installed snowmaking. And it was just one day since, you know, in the early 90s. And so they can, you know, on snow at all, they can still have skiing and they can supplement.

And in some places, it's pretty much all they have, like where I grew up in Wintergreen, Virginia. So I don't, you know, I certainly think it's okay. One thing that's come up with the fake snow is people somehow think that water use is all consumptive and it's just gone. But the truth is, it just kind of goes right back into the, it just runs off, you know, in the snow melts and goes, you know, right back into the watershed or down into groundwater. Mostly it's the energy, I'd say the consumptive part of it. What uses up the most energy is you have to ionize the snow.

So air compressors, it's a lot of electricity to run the compressor houses. I was curious how these work and I just watched a bunch of videos of huge hoses using compressed air or fans to blast tiny water droplets high up in the sky so that they freeze and then flutter down into powder. And apparently this can be an overnight job. Kind of like the snow fairy comes at night in a beanie and a North Face parka and unleashes its giant hose arm octopus creature to cover the mountain and frozen confetti while you sleep.

Cute. Caroline Lewis and Azriel King both want to know, are there, are there any ways to better clear snow off your car, walkway, etc. aside from scraping and shoveling? As a snow expert. Yeah, I don't have any good answers. I mean, I don't like to use the salt because pets can, and it sort of marks things. And I kind of enjoyed that, you know, it's like a good way to get some exercise when you're stuck inside.

Right. It's CrossFit. Yeah. Engine CrossFit. Kind of. You got to watch your back. That's I think the main, there's, there is, they even teach in avalanche classes, I think called strategic shoveling, which is more about how to most quickly extract people has

to do with like tiered levels and stuff like that. You don't just want to dig straight into the ground, but just like any, any working at your desk that are correct ways to sit, it's correct ways to shovel, correct ways to hold your, so you don't damage your back while shoveling. So when you're digging someone out of an avalanche, it's almost like terraced. Yeah. This is something that Bruce, I really came up with, which is, is great. The strategic shoveling, for one thing, if they're on a steep slope, you want to shovel

in towards them, not straight down at them because it's the fastest way to shovel out. It's an excavate. And then also if usually depends on what kind of setting you're in, but especially if you're at like a ski resort where there are a lot of people, you have more than chances are you can only have like one or two people up front doing fast shoveling. Then there's going to be other people who maybe aren't doing anything. So if they can get behind them on like a terrace, you know, if you can imagine like steps going down and shovel out that debris from the first group, you can, that's the most efficient way to

dig. Also, if your car snowed in, I did see some tips like using a lighter to heat your key if your lock is frozen or putting on a pre snow car cover. So you can just remove that sucker, do a little less scraping. Another option is just to never go outside again. Now main advice, lift with your legs and not your back. And if you're my dad, please wait until I can come up and help you. Please.

Thank you, sir. Also, a lot of you had a similar question and I'm just going to say your names with my mouth now. Spencer Gillespie, Billy Merino, Carla Hickenlooper, Lauren Harder, Sarah Clark, Barbara Blackie and Eva. A lot of people had questions about climate change. Are you seeing your work change a lot in the last 10 years? Yeah, in the last 10 years, you know, that's a particularly interesting period of time. There's strong evidence that from snow radars, for instance, Ben Hatch is doing some great work

up at the Desert Research Institute in UNR. They've got these snow radars that they can look at the snow levels. And they've had a huge increase statistically significant over the last 10 years. And, you know, one problem is these snow radars haven't been around that long. So it's hard to place that, you know, in context. It could be that this is just a warm 10 year episode. That might not all be due to climate change or partly due to, you know, it's unclear. But anyway, what that has meant, even at Mammoth, which has a pretty high elevation,

you know, the base is 9,000 feet of main lodge. There's tons of mid-winter rain now, even higher up on the mountain. Oh, wow. Which just never happened. And they've had some interesting wet snow avalanches. You get different kinds of avalanches when the snow is wet like that and it's raining on it. And stuff that a lot of the patrollers have never seen before. Because it's so yeah, it's definitely warmer.

The climate protections are pretty dismal over the next 50, especially 100 years. It's a time to definitely think about for California, especially think about the way that we depend on snowmelt to give us the stream flow that we need throughout the summer. It'll basically mean, you know, that the snow starts melting earlier. It'll coincide with more snowmelt during the wet season. Oh, got it. So more rain on snow events, flooding, yeah, a lot of things. And just less water throughout the summer, you know.

And we've already seen that, you know, forest fires. And, you know, that has a big soil moisture, right? It's very important to whether or not forest fires occur. And that's a direct, you know, if you have snow sitting on top of that, soil for longer and it melts later, there's more moisture. So we know that the dwindling snow packs have a lot of far reaching effects. Right. So snow hydrology work is not just about skiing and avalanches.

We need data that folks like Ned are collecting and crunching to figure out how much water we can expect the rest of the year. Another very one more scientific question. Jillian Leach wants to know what scientifically is the best kind of snow for snowballs. The warm and dense kind. Okay. Yeah. Zero hesitation there.

Yes. Colorado tends to get the latest snow, sort of at least in the mountain regions in the U.S. That need upper peninsula of Michigan and some of the lake effect areas. But not so much in the Sierra or the Cascades or some of these maritime areas. That dense, like heavy snow is what you want because it'll pack better into a snowball. As it gets closer to freezing, it's easier to make snowballs with. Do snow hydrologists ever have snowball fights? No.

I haven't with my kids, but. You don't get beaned in the face by a colleague? No. You're like, Mark, what are you doing? Okay. I think that's just a, you know, it's you sort of get used to everything, right? And just get used to being around a lot of snow. That makes sense.

Two last questions. What's the worst thing about your job? The worst thing is I don't get outside as much as I would like to. Or, you know, I'm not in the snow as much as I want to because to be because, you know, scientific research, it can be really tough. You know, like writing and being in front of a computer is not always the easiest thing to do. I think anyone who's being honest would say that. You know, it can be very rewarding in a lot of other ways.

I would like to be sort of in the snow more, so to speak. Do you get to ski a lot when you're up there in Mammoth? I do. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I get out quite a bit. I do cross country skiing, skate skiing. I do a lot of back country skiing. Yeah, it depends on the year.

This year looks like a good one so far. What is your favorite thing about snow or about your job? My favorite thing about my snow or my job, I mean, two sort of different questions, I guess. But for me, it's that I get to work on something that I love. But I love, you know, I love being out there and the physical parts of working with snow and on the snow and the places that I've been to do that. It also, you know, actually is just a really interesting material.

And it's like one of the brightest substances on earth that exists near its melting temperature. It is extremely weak compared to any other material. You know, I think those are some of the reasons why people find snow just fascinating in the first place. As you peel that onion, it just seems to have more and more layers and interesting things about it. I wonder, why does it smell? Why does snow have a smell? A smell? Yeah, shouldn't.

Okay, there you go. Yeah, sometimes, I mean, it's like when it's really quiet. It sounds like it's quiet when it's the snow starts up, because the snow is acting like a baffle, like a sound baffle. And so maybe the same thing is going on with smells. I mean, they're not really, so whatever, you know, if you're long under or it smells terrible or whatever, it's just kind of coming back at you when it's snowing. It's not really.

That's funny. Yeah, that was a great question. Thank you so much for doing this and for meeting me essentially in a parking lot at LAX. Yeah, no problem. So we're probably one of the weirdest part of your jobs. Okay, so email a stranger, find a bench, and ask smart people stupid questions, because they have such good stories, and you'll never see snow the same. Now, Ned is not on social media, but allergies is.

It's at allergies on Instagram and Twitter. I'm Ali Ward with one L on both. There are more links up at aliward.com slash allergies. And to support via Patreon and submitologist questions before I record, and to see some behind the scenes videos of my closet, where I'm currently recording this, you can head to patreon.com slash allergies. Thank you, Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltas for managing allergiesmerch.com, where you can get pins and hats and totes and shirts.

Thanks, Erin Talbert and Hannah Lipo for admitting the Facebook allergies group. Thank you to the Volvosaurus on Twitter for gently letting me know when talking about the benefits of having episode transcripts. Deaf and hard of hearing is preferred over the term hearing impaired, which many folks consider offensive. I'm so sorry, I had no idea. Thank you for upgrading my brain with that info. Extra editing help this week was done by Jared Sleeper of the Mental Health Podcast,

My Good Bad Brain. Also, his Instagram stories while shopping at Ross are my favorite. Jared underscore Sleeper on Instagram. Main editing was done by ology's top Brazil nut, Stephen Ray Morris of the podcasts The Percast and See Jurassic Right. Those are about cats and dinos. Thank you, Stephen, you're the best. Once again, a donation was made this week to esavalanche.org in memory of Walter Rosenthal.

Now, if you listen to the end of the episodes, you know I tell you a secret. And this week, my secret is I had a dream that I bought like a Costco size box of frosted flakes, and I was so pissed to wake up and realize it wasn't real. And I was so horny for cereal. I crumbled up a bunch of rice cakes, and then I poured vanilla coffee creamer over them, and I was like, this is pretty tight. And then I had another bowl, and by bowl, I mean mug. This all happened in a mug.

Anyway, live your life, cut your own hair, pick an obscure color like umber over million, and then type it into Google image search. You deserve it. I love you. Okay, bye-bye. Stay warm. Dozoology, letology, nanotechnology, meteorology, nephrology, nephrology, seriology, letology.