Depth, Cold, Danger: What a 24-Year Satellite Study Just Revealed About Avalanches Imagine a north-facing slope in mid-February. The snow is deep, the air bitterly cold, and every few minutes you hear the distant whump of a settling slab. A new 24-year satellite study of the Altai Mountains in East Kazakhstan confirms what those sounds already whisper to backcountry skiers: avalanche danger starts and ends with snow depth and temperature. In fact, […] Avalanche Clay Malott | May 12, 2025 0 Comments
Top 15 Worldwide Ski Resorts For Students Skiing not only boosts our overall happiness and well-being but is also beneficial for both our physical and mental health. Maintaining good mental and physical health is essential when we are studying, especially in a foreign country. Altitude Futures has released a brand new ranking, taking into account all the facts that make a study location perfect for skiing. Related: […] SnowBrains | October 18, 2023 0 Comments
Study Reveals the High Vulnerability of European Ski Resorts to Global Warming A new European study has investigated the effects of climate change on European ski resorts and warns that global warming will leave 53% of Europe’s ski resorts at very high risk for snow supply in the future. If temperatures increase by 1.5°C, around a third (32%) of European ski resorts would be severely impacted. This proportion could be limited to […] Industry News Julia Schneemann | September 17, 2023 0 Comments
Study Finds Avalanche Victims With Long Burial Times (≥60 Min) Have Only 19% Chance of Survival Surviving an avalanche burial is completely correlated with burial time. As a rule of thumb, the longer someone’s been buried the lower the chance of survival. A recent study has been published where researchers looked at all completely buried avalanche victims with a burial duration of ≥60 min between 1997 and 2018 in Switzerland, and drew conclusions from the retrospective data. […] Avalanche AvyBrains | June 11, 2021 0 Comments
Greenland’s Ice Sheet May Have Reached a Tipping Point That Sets It On an Irreversible Path Greenland’s ice sheet may have reached a tipping point that sets it on an irreversible path. Nearly 40 years of Greenland satellite data showed that its glaciers have shrunk so much that even if global warming stopped today, the ice sheet would continue to shrink. Related: Study Finds Climate Change Has Stopped 6,500 Years of Global Cooling According to the […] Brains Sebastian Opazo | August 21, 2020 2 Comments
Specially Trained Dogs Could Detect Coronavirus [arve url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDYsZfd-fY&feature=emb_title"] Sebastian Opazo | July 30, 2020 Likes Tweets 0 Comments
NOAA: Seeing Red Across The North Pacific Ocean Written by Michelle L’Heureux on Climate.gov The Pacific Ocean is throwing a bit of a temper tantrum these days, but it’s not where you think it might be. Often we focus on the tropical Pacific Ocean because it’s where ENSO takes center stage, but currently, temperature departures across the Tropics are pretty blah. Instead, for the past few months, it’s the North Pacific Ocean […] Weather WeatherBrains | October 25, 2019 0 Comments
Denver’s Traffic Congestion Is Only Getting Worse, Study Predicts The amount of time spent in Denver traffic jams is expected to double over the next 20 years, according to an annual report on roadway congestion from the Denver Regional Council of Governments. This is bad news for Denver-area skiers who frequently travel to ski resorts along the I-70 corridor, one of Colorado’s most driven highways and home to many […] Industry News SnowBrains | October 18, 2019 6 Comments
STUDY: 30% of All Avalanche Fatalities in Western USA Occurred During an Atmospheric River Research published by Benjamin Hatchet, Susan Burak, Jon Rutz, Nina Oakley, Edward Bair, and Michael Kaplan in the Journal of Hydrometerology suggests a strong link between Atmospheric River (AR) events and avalanche deaths. According to their research, 31% of avalanche fatalities between 1998 and 2014 occurred either during or shortly after an AR event. West Coast skiers got very […] Avalanche Roger Romani | February 17, 2019 0 Comments
New Study Concludes That Humans Are Shifting the Seasons Worldwide Climate scientists have dug deeper than weather station records and now have yet another reason to confidently determine that humans are causing the warming of our planet. Human-caused climate change, brought on by the burning of fossil fuels, is affecting seasonal cycle temperatures. In short, humans are shifting the seasons. Satellites began recording global temperatures and compiling a record in […] Jenah MacGrain | August 1, 2018 0 Comments
The Earth’s First Snowfall Image: BDFjade Between 2.2 and 2.4 billion years ago, big masses of land rose quickly from the depths of the sea, causing big changes on our planet. A new study published on May 24th in the journal Nature suggests that it was these changes that caused Earth’s first snowfall 2.4 billion years ago. Image: thegreatsummit.com The study shows the findings […] Featured Article Jenah MacGrain | June 9, 2018 0 Comments
What Do you Think the Total Snow Accumulation in North America is in One Year? | New Study Discovers it’s Way More than Previously Thought A first-of-its-kind study recently revealed that the accumulation of snow up in the mountains of North America is way more than anyone anticipated. The revelation has forced scientists to revise previous estimates of snow volume for the entire continent, and they’ve discovered that snow accumulation in a typical year is 50 percent higher than previously thought. If spread evenly across […] Industry News Steven Agar | March 15, 2018 0 Comments
Study Reports that “Impact of Global Warming is Evident” in the Himalayas The Himalayas, the world’s highest mountains, are getting warmer, according to a study published in science journal Current Science, livemint.com reports. “Total precipitation (rainfall + snowfall) was found to increase whereas snowfall was found to decrease with concurrent significant increase in rainfall at all zones of NWH,” the study said. It warned that rising trends in liquid precipitation have a negative […] Weather WeatherBrains | February 27, 2018 0 Comments
STUDY: 30% of all Avalanche Fatalities Amongst Tourers Occur Whilst Ascending the Mountain Utah Avalanche Center has an interesting blog post on their site, titled ‘Avalanche Fatalities During Uphill Traveling‘. According to their research, 30% of tourer fatalities occur when the skiers are ascending. Whilst most tourers, and indeed a lot of educational resources, focus on the dangers whilst descending, it is clear that more focus needs to be put on assessing terrain and […] Avalanche Steven Agar | February 8, 2018 0 Comments
Snowboarders Three Times More Likely to get Injured than Skiers, Study Finds A recent study has found that with a rise in the popularity of skiing and snowboarding as fun winter sports, the number of skier and snowboarder injuries also continue to rise, and according to researchers, snowboarders are three times more likely than skiers to sustain injury. Lead researcher Brett D. Owens from the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University […] Industry News Steven Agar | January 17, 2018 3 Comments
STUDY: Ski Helmets Are Not Reducing Head Injures As Much As They Used To… According to a study recently published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, ski helmets aren’t reducing head injuries as much as they used to. “We observed an unexpected reduction in the protective effect of a skiing helmet. This may be due to new skiing trends in the alpine resorts.” – Conclusion in abstract of the study in British Journal of […] Industry News SnowBrains | September 7, 2016 1 Comment
Brain Post: Why Do Women Prefer Musicians? All guys know that women prefer musicians. All girls know it, too. A new study from the University of Sussex (Menstrual cycle phase alters women’s sexual preferences for composers of more complex music) is now telling us that there’s science behind girls being crazy for rock stars. This study shows that women in their most fertile […] Brains SnowBrains | May 7, 2014 1 Comment
Brain Post: Study Says NOT Drinking Will Shorten Your Life Not drinking is killing you… Seriously. There have been many studies showing that drinking moderate amounts of alcohol (2 drinks/day for men, 1 drink/day for women) is good for your health and can actually lengthen life. These studies generally focus on alcohol being healthy as it thins the blood and causes benefits to heart and circulatory health. A 2010 study in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research that followed 1,824 participants between the ages of 55 and 65 for 20 years is showing that the benefits of moderate alcohol use may actually be social. There are some great facts from this study and we’re […] Brains SnowBrains | December 17, 2013 0 Comments
Deforestation in Amazon Could Reduce Snowfall in Sierra Nevada by 50% The deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest in South America via logging, burning, gold mining, coca plant cultivation, and cattle grazing could reduce California’s Sierra Nevada snowpack by 50% and the Pacific Northwest snowpack by 20% according to a new study published in the Journal of Climate by Princeton University & the University of Miami. […] SnowBrains | November 12, 2013 4 Comments
NASA: Pollution, Not Rising Temperatures, May Have Melted Alpine Glaciers NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently finished a study that shows that Europe’s glaciers may have begun their rapid melting in the 1860s due to soot from the industrial revolution. It’s thought by NASA that this soot absorbed sunlight and greatly accelerated the melting of Europe’s glacier system. “If you look back through the 1600s and 1700s, the glaciers were big […] Brains SnowBrains | September 4, 2013 2 Comments