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Tourists from New Zealand, China and Germany were among the dead at a number of different ski resorts. Austrian authorities put in place a level four avalanche alert - the second highest - following intense snowfall and wind in the area. Despite the warnings, ski resorts in western Austria have been filling up due to school holidays in Vienna. Austrian police announced five deaths on Sunday, including that of a 59-year-old man who was using a snow plough in the western region of Tyrol. They also recovered the bodies of a ski guide in Sankt Anton am Arlberg and a...

Researchers at Columbia Engineering report today that they have developed the first nanomaterial that demonstrates "photon avalanching," a process that is unrivaled in its combination of extreme nonlinear optical behavior and efficiency. The realization of photon avalanching in nanoparticle form opens up a host of sought-after applications, from real-time super-resolution optical microscopy, precise temperature and environmental sensing, and infrared light detection, to optical analog-to-digital conversion and quantum sensing. Avalanching processes—where a cascade of events is triggered by series of small perturbations—are found in a wide range of phenomena beyond snow slides, including the popping of champagne bubbles, nuclear explosions, lasing,...

A backcountry recreationist was killed by an avalanche on Parkview Mountain in northern Colorado on Tuesday afternoon, authorities said. The fatality was reported to the Grand County dispatch center at 1:32 p.m., the Grand County Sheriff's Office said in a news release. Both Grand and Jackson counties' rescue teams responded to the area. There were conflicting accounts about whether the party of three people were skiing or snowmobiling, said Scott Toepfer, an avalanche forecaster for the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. ... Toepfer said he suspects the avalanche was caused by what's known as a persistent slab slide. This condition is...

It is not a good ideal to video a Snow Avalanche coming at you.

2/10/2010 - BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan (AFNS) -- A series of avalanches struck a high pass in the Parwan Province of Afghanistan that have reportedly killed or injured hundreds of Afghan travelers. The avalanches, which occurred Feb. 8 and 9th, cut off a major route between Kabul and northern Afghanistan. Afghan doctors and coalition members of Task Force Medical East, 82nd Airborne, 30th Medical Command and the 455th Expeditionary Medical Group along with volunteers from across Bagram Airfield sprang into action, rendering medical care and assistance. The initial call was received by the TF MED-East Tactical Operations Center at 3:28 a.m....

A NASA spacecraft in orbit around Mars has taken the first ever image of active avalanches near the Red Planet's north pole. The image shows tan clouds billowing away from the foot of a towering slope, where ice and dust have just cascaded down. The High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took the photograph Feb. 19. It is one of approximately 2,400 HiRISE images being released today. Ingrid Daubar Spitale of the University of Arizona, Tucson, who works on targeting the camera and has studied hundreds of HiRISE images, was the first person to notice the...

DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - Winter temperatures are rising steadily across the European Alps but snow volumes have varied wildly, making it harder to assess the risk of avalanches, a Swiss climate expert said on Friday. Climatologist Christoph Marty said the cold winds and snow that greeted more than 2,000 members of the world's political and business elites in Davos this week masked a clear warming trend in the region, where winter had a very mild start. A reduction in snow cover generally means that the danger of avalanches decreases, but Marty said increased variability of snowfall made it hard to...

Kabul, Nov 3 "I thought I was going to die — the earth was raining from the skies," a Taliban survivor told the Sun while describing how an entire unit was buried alive in a strike by US B-52s. Osman Rakhim, 23, said the explosions caused by the giant US bombers started a landslide on his mountainside position. He said dozens of troops were killed when hundreds of tons of earth and rock came down on top of them. Rakhim wandered away from the carnage in a daze and later surrendered to the Northern Alliance. He said a whole unit ...

GREAT ST. BERNARD PASS, Switzerland, Oct. 27 - The only dog right now at the 950-year-old hospice of St. Bernard is a very nice golden retriever named Justy. The issue of those other dogs - the famously huge and heroic ones, who toted brandy barrels in legend, who lived here for centuries and sniffed scores of stranded travelers out of the snow - is not one that the Rev. Frédéric Gaillard is keen to talk about. "Now there are helicopters," Father Gaillard, one of four remaining monks at the St. Bernard's hospice here, said with some irritation. "And we have...

<p>Carlsbad Detective Sgt. Bob Wick, left, looks for evidence as tow truck driver Rusty Russell helps remove a car from the Auga Hedionda Creek in Carlsbad early Tuesday. Three women died and two were injured trying to cross the swollen creek Monday night after heavy rains.</p>

US strike planners used a new tactic in the Afghan War: deliberately triggered avalanches. By having geologists study the terrain through recon photos, they could pick out areas that were "rockslides waiting to happen". If Taliban or al Qaeda troops were downhill from these areas, bombs were targeted to hit the mountainsides to trigger huge waves of crushed rock. Doing this provided surprise, as the targeted troops did not realize they were under attack when bombs landed a mile or two away from them. In one case, a large concentration of troops in a forested area could not be accurately...