BACKGROUND Avalanches are a significant cause of winter recreational fatalities in mountain regions. The purpose of this study was to determine the relative contributions of trauma and asphyxia to avalanche deaths. METHODS We reviewed all avalanche fatalities between 1984 and 2005 that had been investigated by the offices of the British Columbia Coroners Service and the Chief Medical Examiner...

Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Site U1400 (CARI-07C, 14°32.58’N, 61°27.55’W, 2745 m below seafloor) is located west of Martinique. Site U1400 was dedicated to the study of debris avalanche emplacement and associated erosional processes. The evolution of the active Montagne Pelée volcano on Martinique is characterized by three major flank collapse events (~0.1 Ma, ~25 ka, and ~9,000 years ago...

By 2008 detailed avalanche warning for the entire Norway is not available. The Norwegian Meteorological Institute only issues a general warning for large regions of the country for danger level 4 or 5, mainly based on automatic indexes integrated in the meteorological forecasting models. Regional and local avalanche warning are issued by the NGI on request of customers such as the railway or ro...

Avalanche disasters are associated with significant monetary losses. It is thus crucial that avalanche risk assessments are based on a consistent and proper assessment of the uncertainties involved in the modelling of the avalanche runout zones and the estimations of the damage potential. We link a Bayesian network (BN) to a Geographic Information System (GIS) for avalanche risk assessment in o...

A laser pulser for a pulsed time-of-flight laser radar is presented. The pulser is constructed using a single avalanche transistor in order to keep the schematic simple and to avoid the problems encountered when connecting several avalanche transistors in parallel. The schematic of the laser pulser was optimized and it was noticed that the optical peak pulse power of the laser can be increased ...

To gain a better understanding of the surfaces of planets and small bodies in the solar system, the flow behavior of granular material for various gravity levels is of utmost interest. We performed a set of reduced-gravity measurements to analyze the flow behavior of granular matter with a quasi-2D hourglass under coarse-vacuum conditions and with a tilting avalanche box. We used the Bremen dro...

In this paper we examine nonradiative processes ~cross relaxation and energy migration! vital for the generation of blue avalanche emission in Tm:LiYF4 crystals subjected to radiation near 648 nm. Time-domain and temperature-dependent measurements indicate that two sequential cross-relaxation processes dominate the nonradiative decays of the G4 and H4 excited states in this crystal. The occurre...

When using avalanche photodiodes (APDs) in applications, temperature dependence of avalanche breakdown voltage is one of the performance parameters to be considered. Hence, novel materials developed for APDs require dedicated experimental studies. We have carried out such a study on thin Al1-x Ga x As0.56Sb0.44 p-i-n diode wafers (Ga composition from 0 to 0.15), plus measurements of avalanche g...

Seismic signals generated by avalanches have been studied by the avalanche team of the Universitat de Barcelona since 1994. The aim of the study is to understand the avalanche seismic signals in relation to their sources to obtain information on the avalanche dynamics and hence use seismic measurements for monitoring purposes. To this end, experiments focused on improving the knowledge of seism...

Single-photon detectors (SPDs) are the most sensitive instruments for light detection. In the near-infrared range, SPDs based on III–V compound semiconductor avalanche photodiodes have been extensively used during the past two decades for diverse applications due to their advantages in practicality including small size, low cost and easy operation. In the past decade, the rapid developments and...