WEEK 7 + 8 Flashcards
(79 cards)
1
Q
How does British historian Simon Sharma think Human Imagination nad Perception has Shaped Mountains?
A
- Simon Shama
- british historian
- landscape is the work of the mind.
- It’s scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.
2
Q
How did people view mountains during the Middle Ages?
A
- Eg. During the Middle Ages and much of the Renaissance, many people in Europe shunned mountain ranges.
- They were believed to be dreadful places and the haunts of demonic beings like witches and trolls.
- Eg. Johann Schweitzer → his suggestion that dragons could be found in the mountains of Switzerland, was in the very early 1700s, a late example of this dark brooding tradition.
3
Q
How did earlier Europeans, like the ancient Greeks or Celts, view mountains?
A
- For the Greeks, high peaks were the abodes of Gods and other deities.
- The 12 major gods and goddesses of mythology resided in a fortress paradise on Mount Olympus.
- Zeus was the king of Gods and he was born and raised in mountains caves.
- The Muses, who inspired music and art and literature and science, they lived in the mountains.
- Mountains were also the haunts of nymphs, and centaurs and other fantastic magical creatures.
- The wilderness and isolation of mountains also impressed the ancient Greeks.
- In the 8th century epic poem, the Iliad, one of the oldest works of Western literature, Homer vividly describes mountain weather.
- “In the Spring, snow-water torrents risen and flowing down the mountainsides hurl at a confluence their mighty waters out of gorges, filled by tributaries and far away upon the hills a shepherd hears the roar. As south wind and the southeast wind, contending in mountain groves, make all the forest thrash…”
- The mountains that figures most prominently in Greek mythology and literature is Mount Olympus is Thessaly.
- Olympus, a word that predates the Greeks, was likely used to mean peak or mountain in a generic sense, for there are a number of Greek mountains named Olympus.
- Several of these, like Mount Olympus in Thessaly, were associated with weather cults.
- Zeus after all was the god of storms and weather, presiding over both Gods and mortals from mountain heights.
4
Q
How did Italy, the Romans, view mountains?
A
- The Apennines run its entire lengths, and the European Alps from its northern borders.
- BUT Romans didn’t generally share Greek’s appreciation for mountains, far from it.
- For the Romans, mountains were primarily viewed as obstacles for commerce and conquest.
- By Caesar’s time, Roman’s were regularly crossing the Alps and they seemed to have generally dreaded the experience,
- To appease the primarily Celtic deities of the Alpine passes to commemorate their safe passage, the Romans made offerings of coins and small bronze tablets, inscribed with the names of the deity and traveller.
- eg. famous crossing of the Alps, made by Hannibal, a Carthian general in 281 BC.
- “Here everything is wrapped in eternal frost, white with snow, and held in the grip of primeval ice. The mountain steeps are so stiff with cold that although they tower up into the sky, the warmth of the sunshine cannot soften their hardened rime… No spring comes to this region, nor the charms of Summer. Misshapen Winter dwells alone on these dread crests, and guards them as her perpetual abode. […] Here too in this Alpine home, have the winds and the tempest fixed their furious dominion. Men grow dizzy amidst the lofty crags and the mountains dissapear in the clouds.”
- knowing or not, Hannibal’s caravan may have been experiencing some of the physiological effects we discussed in lesson 4.
5
Q
How did later Medieval Europeans, like their Roman predecessors see mountains and nature?
A
- Later, medieval Europeans, much like their Roman predecessors, seem to pay little attention to the grander aspects of nature.
- There are very few favourable references to mountains, and either the literature or the graphic art of the age.
- As Christianity spread through Europe, natural sacred sites, central to the practice of pre-Christian religions, were destroyed to a great extent.
- Mountains were now dangerous places, for the most part, sacred only in a very negative, demonic sense.
- These suspicions would continue into the 18th and 19th centuries, when medieval fears would subside to a new romantic enthusiasm.
6
Q
How did the East view mountains in the past?
A
- Eg. Attitudes in the East greatly contrasted with those from the west.
- In the east, the appreciation of mountains began much much earlier.
- According to the origin myth of the Korean people, they are descended from a union of a sky God and a bear women on the sacred volcano Mount Paektu, the highest mountain on the Korean peninsula.
- Its larger crater lake on top is suitably named Heaven Lake.
- In Japan, China, Tibet, and India, mountains have also been long adored and worshipped.
- In China, they were considered sacred at least 2,000 years before the birth of Christ.
7
Q
What was the impact of mountains on early Chinese cultures?
A
- China
- The impact of mountains on early Chinese cultures was huge.
- The great ranges of that country were seen to be the body of a cosmic being.
- According to some, a dragon, the rocks were it’s bones, the water was its blood, the vegetation its hair, the clouds and mess were its breath.
- In many Asian culture, dragons don’t generally have an evil connotation as they do in the West.
- Dragons are benevolent creatures, controlling the elements and guarding sources of wisdom.
- Until the 3rd century AD, the Chinese regarded mountains as dangerous places of supernatural power, places that only those with proper spiritual training could safely enter.
- But that changes around the 4th century: a shift in the Chinese capitals to the more mountains in the south, as well as a growing discontentment with imperial bureaucracy, mean that people were increasingly traveling to mountains for leisure purposes.
- They were now pursuing painting and poetry.
- They were seeking inspiration in the beautiful mountain landscape.
- A similar transformation wouldn’t happen for a thousand years in the West.
- Chinese 5th c poem shows this re-imagining of mountain landscape → “In the mountains all is pure, all is calm; all complication is cut off. Rare are they who know to listen; happy they who possess wisdom. If the cold wind stings and bothers you, sit in the sun; it is always warm there. Its hot rays burn like flames, While, opposite, in the shade, all is frost and snow.”
- “Here is the realm of harmony and joy, Where the past and the present becomes eternal.”
8
Q
What was the connection between mountains and pilgrimage in the East?
A
- For many people in the East, sacred mountains were a focus for religious pilgrimmage.
- One related site was Mount Kailash in Tibet
- perhaps the most holy mountains on Earth
- Kailash is sacred to adherents of the Hindu, the Buddhist, and the Jain and the Bon religions. → about 1/4 of the world’s population.
- For Hindus, Kailash is home to Lord Shiva, one of the 3 major deities.
- For Buddhists, it’s the deity Demchog, who represents supreme bliss.
- The summit of Kailash remains untrodden to this day, no one has ever stood on its summit.
- To climb the mountain would be sacreligious
- Instead, it is a favourite for circumambulation, which is the act of walking around a sacred object or idol
- One related site was Mount Kailash in Tibet
- Many of the higher peaks of the Himalayas are considered sacred by the people of that region.
- With the arrival of tourism and mountaineering in particular, governments have had to restrict access to particular areas.
- Eg. in Nepal, the summits of Kanchanjunga and Machipuchare are both off-limits for religious reasons.
- Airplane flights are also prohibited over certain peaks.
- This restriction would relax with the advent of jet travel in the 1960s, but when aviation first began, a planned English flight over Mount Everest in the 1930s caused enormous controversy in both Tibet and Nepal.
- Mount Everest is known to the Nepalese as Sagarmatha, meaning forehead in the sky.
- To Tibetans, the mountain is Chomolungma, “mother goddess of the world.”
9
Q
When exactly did settlement in mountains begin?
A
- We don’t know exactly when settlement in mountains began.
- In the European Alps and the mountains of the Middle East, archaeological sites indicate the presence of humans as far back as the Stone age, 100,000 years ago.
- In the Americas, radiocarbon dating of bone, shells and artifacts reveal a human presence in mountains in 10 or 11,000 years, almost as long as humans are known to have inhabited the Americas.
10
Q
What do the Andes show of human settlement?
A
- The Andes contain perhaps the most spectacular display of human settlement in the mountains
- Here, thousands of years ago, at elevations nearing 4,500 meters, these flourished civilizations that remain a marvel to the modern world.
- The culmination of these cultures is reflected in the stone ruins of Machu Picchu, a 15th-century Inca settlement located high in the Peruvian Andes.
- Machu Picchu appears to lie at the centre of a network of related sites and trails, and many landmarks, both human-made and mountainous appear to align with astronomical events like the Solstice sunset for example.
- The Incas had no written language and so they left no record as to why they built the site or how they used it before it was abandoned in the early 16th c.
- We know among their deities was the sun, the moon, stars, and mountains.
- Today, Machu Picchu is among the greatest artistic, architectural and land-use acheivements anywhere and the most significant tangible legacy of the Inca civilization.
11
Q
What is the western romantic enthusiasm of mountains?
A
The abodes of gods, sacred embodiments, the focus of pilgrimage all of these ideas persists in today’s widespread romantic enthusiasm for mountains, a landscape commonly celebrated for its beauty and its wildness
12
Q
What are mountains as “wild landscapes”?
A
- The Western attraction to wild landscape is relatively new.
- Eg. 250 years ago, North Americans and Europeans were not seeking wilderness experiences, something that’s very much in vogue today.
- As late as the 1700s, the most common usage of the word, wilderness, in the english language referred to landscapes that generally carried adjectives far different from the ones used today.
- Wilderness meant things like: desolate, deserted, savage, or barren
- Wilderness was considered a waste or a wasteland.
- people were likely to feel bewilderment or terror in wild landscapes and mountains.
- In only a couple hundred years, mountains would be transformed in popular Western thinking from sites of wild desolation to sites of wild splendor.
13
Q
What ideas changed the way the west saw mountains, from wild desolation to sites of wild splendour?
A
- Two ideas really remade the way we think about wild landscapes:
- The doctrine of the sublime
- older, more pervasive
- one of the most important expressions of that transatlantic romantic movement.
- the sublime is an aesthetic concept → first articulated by Edmund Burke in the mid 18th century, which referred to the thrill and the danger of confronting untamed nature. → one might meet devils and run the risk of losing one’s soul in such landscapes, but one might also meet God and for some, that thrill possibility was worth any price.
- These were typically landscapes of a vast and immense scale. → were places where one couldn’t help but feel insignificant in the face of it all and be reminded of one’s own mortality.
- The sense of mountains as a landscape where the supernatural lay just beneath the surface was increasingly expressed in the literature and the poetry, the art of the day.
- God was on the mountaintop, in the chasm, in the waterfall, in the thundercloud and mists.
- The myth of the frontier
- North American, specifically, American.
- The doctrine of the sublime
- The sites North Americans chose for their first national parks:
- Yellowstone was the first national park in the US in 1872.
- it was the first officially designated national park anywhere
- it’s best known for its geothermal features, especially its geysers.
- Yosemite National Park
- Grand Canyon
- Mount Rainier
- Canada’s first was Rocky Mountains National Park, Banff.
- It was followed by Yoho and Glacier National Parks.
- Yellowstone was the first national park in the US in 1872.
- These are all sublime landscapes, and they were nearly all in mountains.
- They’re all places of tremendous physical relief.
- Less sublime places weren’t yet seen as worthy of celebration and protection.
14
Q
What was The Doctrine of the Sublime?
A
- older, more pervasive
- western thinking
- one of the most important expressions of that transatlantic romantic movement.
- the sublime is an aesthetic concept → first articulated by Edmund Burke in the mid 18th century, which referred to the thrill and the danger of confronting untamed nature. → one might meet devils and run the risk of losing one’s soul in such landscapes, but one might might also meet God and for some, that thrill possiblity was worth any price.
- These were typically landscapes of a vast and immense scale. → were places where one couldn’t help but feel insignificant in the face of it all and be reminded of one’s own mortality.
- The sense of mountains as a landscape where the supernatural lay just beneath the surface was increasingly expressed in the literature and the poetry, the art of the day.
- God was on the mountaintop, in the chasm, in the waterfall, in the thundercloud and mists.
15
Q
What was the Myth of the Frontier?
A
- North American, specifically, American.
- The sites North Americans chose for their first national parks:
- Yellowstone was the first national park in the US in 1872.
- it was the first officially designated national park anywhere
- it’s best known for its geothermal features, especially its geysers.
- Yosemite National Park
- Grand Canyon
- Mount Rainier
- Canada’s first was Rocky Mountains National Park, Banff.
- It was followed by Yoho and Glacier National Parks.
- Yellowstone was the first national park in the US in 1872.
- These are all sublime landscapes, and they were nearly all in mountains.
- They’re all places of tremendous physical relief.
- Less sublime places weren’t yet seen as worthy of celebration and protection.
16
Q
What kind of Experiences did Sublime Places Evoke?
A
- For the earlier romantic writers and artists in the 1700s, to enter the sublime was far from pleasing.
- eg. William Wordsworth on recounting his experience in the Alps: “The immeasurable height of woods decaying, never to be decayed. The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And in the narrow rent at every turn. Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, The Torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that muttered close upon our ears.”
- To enter into the sublime was to have a religious experience, but one with a wrathful God. No mortal was meant to linger long in these places.
- Wordsworth detected in this wild landscape were more supernatural than natural.
- To enter this sublime was to also come face to face with the abyss, the absolute other of philosophical inquiry in the period of the European Enlightenment.
- In 1816, a group of English literary writers gathered together at a rental house in Geneva, Switzerland, and challenged one another to write a new kind of story.
- they all travelled that summer, but not altogether, to the largest glacier in France, Mer De Glace, high above Hamonix, and marvelled at the vision of a world made waste by endless life-destroying ice.
- This was during the tail end of the Little Ice Age, when fears of advancing glaciers and a future ice age gripped their Western imagination.
- The group believed that this particular way of experiencing the conceptual abyss could lead to profound changes in the way that writers told ghost stories, for example, or stories of romantic isolation, or stories of unforgettable horror.
- They were right.
17
Q
What does Stephen Slemon the subject of the sublime have to say about mountains>
A
- The ideas that come out of that mountain-fed meeting in Geneva have come to the centre of literature and popular culture and they have stayed there.
- Percy Bishelli’s long poem Mont Blanc made the idea of mountain landscapes a necessary part of the romantic sublime.
- Lord Byron’s dramatic play, Manfred, established the figure of the brooding, reclusive, bironic hero. → he is standing high on the mountaintop in the Alps and planning to throw himself off, but you can find that bironic hero in fictional characters like Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff or Severus Snape of the Harry Potter books or Edward Cullen of the Twilight series.
- That Geneva gathering in 1816 led to the publication of the first ever vampire story, John Polidori’s short prose work, The Vampire, and it led to the publication of what is probably the most influential horror novel ever written, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” in 1818
- in early sections of that novel, young Dr. Victor Frankenstein appears as a lover of the mountain landscape.
- His first glimpse of the Mer De Glass brings him to a sublime ecstasy that gives wings to the soul.
- This sunny disposition soon gives way to a much darker view of the mountain sublime.
- When Victor Frankenstein crosses the Mer De Glass alone beneath mountains belonging to another earth, the habitation of another race of beings and on that glacier encounters for the first time since its escape from the lab, the hideous monster he has created and at the nearby hut at Montever the monster tells the doctor his story and it’s a gloomy, doom-ridden vision that emerges from the telling.
- The word of this novel will conclude itself in vision of endless ice.
- Frankenstein begins with one vision of mountain sublimity, the solemn silence of this glorious presence chamber of imperial nature.
- The novel ends with a very different vision of waste and science, culture, and human reason made waste with it.
18
Q
When did we see a change in wilderness and why?
A
- Wilderness areas throughout North America, especially in the United States, were being tamed throughout the 1800s.
- Settlement and railways were all changing the character of these places
- Add to that all of the people who, by centuries end, were now coming to bask in the non-human beauty, maybe to collect fossils, or to see glaciers, or to catch views.
- The terrible awe captured by Wordsworth and his contemporaries began to adopt a much more comfortable, sentimental demeanor.
- Wild landscapes were still sacred, but the religious sentiment that they evoked was much more that of, say, a pleasant parish church than a grand cathedral.
- Also change due to the Myth of the Frontier
19
Q
How does John Muir feed into the late romantic sense of mountains in the 19th c?
A
- best captures this late romantic sense was John Muir, a Scottish-American naturalist whose description of the Sierra Nevada mountains of California brought him considerable fame.
- “No pain here, no dull hours, no fear of the past, no fear for the future. These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God’s beauty, no pretty personal hope or experience has room to be. Drinking Champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breathing the living air, and every movement of limbs is pleasure, while the body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine…”
- The emotions that Muir experiences and evokes in this passage welcome ecstasy are very different from Wordsworth’s awe-filled bewilderment.
- both are participating in the same cultural tradition, both are contributing to that same myth, the mountain as cathedral.
20
Q
What do both Wordsworth and John Muir’s descriptions of mountains contribute to?
A
- The emotions that Muir experiences and evokes in this passage welcome ecstasy and very different from Wordsworth’s awe-filled bewilderment.
- both are participating in the same cultural tradition, both are contributing to that same myth, the mountain as cathedral.
21
Q
How did the Myth of the Frontier transform wild places in the American context?
A
- In the American context, the second cultural movement that helped transform wild places into sacred icons was the myth of the frontier.
- American Historian Frederick Jackson Turner near end of 1880s about this myth: Turner’s thesis was that the best antidote to the ills of an overly refined and civilized modern world, was a return to a simpler, a more primitive living.
- The Myth:
- in moving to the wild, unsettled lands of the Western American frontier, Easterners and Europeans shed the trappings of civilization. They rediscovered their primitive energies and reinvented direct democratic institutions.
- They re-infused themselves with a vigour, an independence, which to this day, remains a source of American democracy and national character.
- Wild country in the American instance became not just a place of religious redemption, but one of national renewal - the quintessential place for experiencing what it meant to be American.
- Built into the frontier myth from the very beginning was the idea that the frontier was passing away.
- Those who have celebrated the frontier myth have almost always looked backwards, and as they did so, mourned an older, a simpler, somehow a truer world that was on the brink of disappearing forever.
- Now this is an old, pervasive story, whereas the American West, the Wild West, was mythologized this way during the 19th century.
- During the 20th century and still today, ideas of the North and Alaska are often romanticized in the same way.
- In the late 1880s, the myth of the disappearing frontier laid the seeds for the first conservation movement.
- If wild lands were so crucial in making a nation than surely wild places needed to be protected.
- the movement to set aside national parks and wilderness areas began to gain real momentum at precisely the time that laments about passing the frontier reached their peak.
22
Q
What was the trend in terms of interest in mountains in the late 19th century?
A
Health and Boredom
- The rejuvenating power attributed to mountains can also be witnessed in late 19th c tourism trends
- Mountains now provided city dwellers with that which they most lack: health and relief from boredom.
- Throughout Europe and North America, health resorts sprang up, and health sanitariums were often built to accommodate sufferers from the ailments of the modern age.
- The dry, clean air, just being in nature was believed to have excellent therapeutic results.
- And so too did bathing in hot mineral springs, which could be found everywhere in the mountains.
- the supposed curative powers of the warm thermal waters created a whole bathing culture at the turn of the century.
- “Invalids carried to the springs in chairs by friendly hands, and when I returned from the Pacific Coast, I saw the same people able to walk down themselves and they were basking in the sunshine on the mountainside. “
- Popular image of mountains was now that of an attractive, healthy environment.
- Canadians have a long tradition of using their mountains to revive body and spirit.
- In fact, the warm mineral springs, those on the slopes of sulfur mountain in Banff, were actually the birthplace of our entire national park system.
23
Q
Other than Health and Boredom what trends were seen in terms of interacting with mountains in the late 19th c.?
A
Mountain Art and Lit
- The romantic enthusiasms for mountains in the 19th c stimulated the proliferation of mountain art and literature.
- English artists such as J. M. W. Turner eg sought to re-evaluate the natural world, depicting nature and mountains as a divine creation as opposed to human artifice.
Sports
- Other unique cultural forms too: elaboration of sporting practices, which also emerged from this re-imagining of mountain landscapes.
- Today mountains play host to a number of sporting and recreational activities from hiking to skiing to mountain biking and rock climbing.
- One of the earliest institutionalized mountain sports was mountain climbing, or mountaineering.
- which was first promoted by a British club formed in London in 1857, The Alpine Club.
- other alpine clubs were soon established throughout Europe and some huge organizations
- eg. by the 1880s, the Austro-German Alpine Club had over 18,000 members
- Mountains were now imagined as a playground and had become an unlimited field for adventure.
24
Q
Who were the early climbers who formed the early alpine club and why were they climbing?
A
- Members of the early alpine club were largely drawn from the professional urban middle classes.
- It was first a gentleman’s dining club, a sort of learned society in which members would read peer-reviewed articles outlining their climbing exploits at meetings, articles that were subsequently published and circulated in Alpine journals.
- Interest in geology, glaciology, and cartography motivated much of the early exploration of the European Alps and the continuation of this tradition meant that a large portion of Victorian mountaineers had a decidedly scientific bend.
- Many climbed for geographical information, adopting the language and zeal of imperial explorers
- Others were artists and writers inspired by romanticism, ascending mountains in contemplation of the sublime
25
Into the 1860s and thereafter, what would increase and provide the dominant framework for climbing mountains and mountain tourism?
- Increasingly into the 1860s and thereafter though, **athleticism** would provide the dominant framework.
- imagined in this way, climbing mountains was purely sport, its virtues lay in moral and physical improvement derived from the hard effort, competition, manliness, and mastery over nature.
- Alberta Mumory: “the essence of the sport of mountaineering… consists in pitting the climber’s skills against the difficulties opposed by the mountain.” → “the essence of the sport lies… in struggling with and overcoming difficulties.”
- died in an avalanche on **Nanga Parbat**, the 9th highest mountain in the world in Pakistan.
- His philosophy on climbing gained traction with later generations of climbers.
- the mountains were now an arena for sport
26
What was the athleticism view of mountains?
- imagined in this way, climbing mountains was purely sport, its virtues lay in moral and physical improvement derived from the hard effort, competition, manliness, and mastery over nature.
- Alberta Mumory: “the essence of the sport of mountaineering… consists in pitting the climber’s skills against the difficulties opposed by the mountain.” → “the essence of the sport lies… in struggling with and overcoming difficulties.”
27
What is Mountaineering's connection to literature?
- Critics have called mountaineering the most literary of all sports.
- Here in Canada, our country’s second longest continuous running periodical is the Alpine Club of Canada’s Canadian Alpine Journal, first printed in 1907.
- Mountaineering today, globally, is the one sport that’s most likely to have its own section in bookstores and climbers often talk about their favourite climbing books with almost as much enthusiasm as they talk about their climbing routes.
- Mountain book and film festivals have become an annual tradition in many mountain towns.
Relationships between Mountain Films and Books → Stephen Slemon
- Mountaineering came together as a consolidation of club culture in the middle of the 19th c.
- Publication played a significant role in the establishment of climbing as a kind of technical practice.
- writing had to cover the science, address the romantic sublime and be practical
- but beyond that it was also the way a climber would secure his or her claim to having made a climb.
- it became earlier on that mountaineering practice required this other skill → of documenting it → you had to not only be able to climb, but to write. → had to be able to make it come alive for a lot of people to see/hear about what they do
- It may be the case now that mountaineers need the skill of filming and not so much writing.
- Have to be a climber, writer and filmmaker all in one go
- With films we are seeing more and more shorter snippets, shorter films, designed for online consumption.
- Banff Mountain Film Festival
- now in its 41st year
- one of the oldest festivals in the world celebrating mountain culture: films, panels, pictures.
- After the festival is over in Banff, they go around the world → 1000 different screenings around the world in 40 countries, all 7 continents
- Today the emotions and attitudes that impelled early mountaineers still prosper in Western imagination
- if anything are more entrenched
- Mountain worship is given to millions of people around the globe and going to the mountains has been one of the fastest growing leisure activities in the last two decades.
- An estimated 10 million Americans go mountaineering annually and 50 million go hiking
- Global sales of outdoor products and services are reckoned at 10 billion annually and growing.
- Any emotional properties that mountains possess are vested in them by human imagination.
28
How can you ensure proper planning and protection in winter for mountain weather?
- winter, planning and preparation becomes even more important → colder temps and more unpredictable weather mean you have less margin for error.
- always check the local weather forecast so you can plan for the expected as well as the unexpected.
- bring a little more gear with you
- double up on gloves, warm hats, and eye protection just to be sure you’re covered if sth gets wet, damaged, or blows away.
- Carry warm liquids in thermos or super lightweight canister stove so you can keep hydrated
- When you stop for breaks, sit on your pack to keep conductive heat loss to a minimum.
- bring out your biggest, most insulated parka
29
According to Kyle Mummery. why did people climb mountains in the mid-1800s?
- Mid-1800s mostly men where going to the mountains for sporting purposes
- To understand recreation or sport of a culture, we have to look at how it’s that activity what it signifies to its participants.
- For most people in the mid 18th c when these alpine sports were being elaborated they saw what they were doing in the first instance as one that was intimately linked with science.
- Scientism was the dominant discourse of what is was they were doing/the way they framed it.
- A residual sort of discourse was romanticism.
- Both Romanticism and Scientism accounted for the large amounts of literature that was produced
- A third one was athleticism → an emergent discourse, not a dominant one.
- slowly came out towards the end of the 18th c.
30
Who was Dean Potter and why did he climb mountains, according to Kyle Mummery?
- Was an extreme climber
- Two days before they were at Taft Point, Dean Potter in a winged suit jumped off taft point to glide in the suit and hit the wall and died.
- Walks the tightline across chasms → at first with a safety leash
- despite falling twice he decides he’s ready to walk the line without a safety leash
- He walks it safely
- says what was going on in his mind was a power of will
- says that it feels like the whole world is opening up to him
What drives that sort of extreme behaviour? What’s the motivation behind it?
- It’s not only that sort of extreme behaviour, it’s one of the popular discourses in mountain studies now, is that athleticism.
- Over 300 ppl have died climbing mountain Everest
- Eg think about what you do on a daily basis:
- Every once in a while you’re driven to try to do something and you have a motive to do something that takes you out of your comfort zone
31
What are the Major Motivation Theories of the Past 100 Years?
- Pre-Cognitive ‘Revolution’
- Psychoanalytic Theory (Freud, 1900-1930)
- to do with various levels of attachment at different stages
- Drive Theory (Hull, 1940-1960)
- Operant Conditioning (Skinner, 1948 - 1960)
- behaviour is simply responding to a mix of rewards and punishment
- still occurs → ppl only do things to gain a reward or avoid a punishment
- train dogs like this
- in 1960s tried to train children with mental development issues this way
- Post Cognitive Revolution
- → We can think about things! → we can think about what that reward means to us. → all of sudden we are aware that a reward doesn’t work for every person or for the same person every time.
- Social Learning Theory (Rotter, 1960-1990)
- giving ppl the idea that they have cognitive abilities to determine their rewards, the ability to get rewards, the value they put on rewards
- Achievement Motivation (Atkinson, 1960-1980)
- people have a need to achieve
- eg Dean Potter → why does he need to achieve those extreme feats?
- Attribution Theory (Heider/Weiner, 1970-1990)
- how you explain things to yourself? Whether you are in control or out of control in terms of where you are going.
- Intrinsic Motivation
- based on people’s behaviour where there is no visible, tangible reward for doing what they do.
32
What is Intrinsic Motivation Theories (coming from the post-cognitive revolution)?
→ Is essentially saying that you control motivation and if you feel that you have causation, that you will be more motivated to do something than if you feel that you’re upon or you’re being controlled by it.
- We can control the behaviour if we feel like we’re controlling the outcome.
- Effectance Motivation (White, 1959)
- Personal Causation (deCharms, 1968)
- Self-Determination Theory (Deci and Ryan, 1975 - present)
- **Flow Theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1979 - present)**
- flow is where you are at an optimal balance of ability and challenge.
- it is a situation that people would love to be in → you’re immersed in the activity and it can be art, sports, anything that you’re doing.
- you lose the sense of time and self you are that immersed in it.
- flow is sort of a goal that people want to hit where they’re engrossed in the activity, completely focused on what they’re doing, nothing else outside them enters into that sphere → they can release themselves from any other worries or distractions they have
- is essentially what Dean Potter was saying → it has taken him from a very dark place and has allowed him to have this feeling of flow.
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According the Kyle Mummery and his discussions of Dean Thomas, why do people climb mountains and participate in extreme behaviours?
- **Flow Theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1979 - present)**
- flow is where you are at an optimal balance of ability and challenge.
- it is a situation that people would love to be in → you’re immersed in the activity and it can be art, sports, anything that you’re doing.
- you lose the sense of time and self you are that immersed in it.
- flow is sort of a goal that people want to hit where they’re engrossed in the activity, completely focused on what they’re doing, nothing else outside them enters into that sphere → they can release themselves from any other worries or distractions they have
- is essentially what Dean Potter was saying → it has taken him from a very dark place and has allowed him to have this feeling of flow.
- challenges from low to high
- ability from low to high
- What you want to be able to do is match your skill and the challenge to get into a flow zone
- as your skill increases, it becomes boring
- eg if you did a slackline out in the quad and you were two feet off the ground, it was a big thrill for you until you learned that skill → now it’s getting boring.
- You need to increase your challenge to get you back into that flow channel.
- so you increase your height
- Dean Potter
- wasn’t just a slack-liner, rock climbing, and doing free climbing
- Eventually he got to the point where the danger of his climbs was so great that he started wearing a base jumping parachute as a backpack so he would climb until he fell off and then, when he knew he was going to fall, he gave himself a good push and fall and then pull the chute out.
- got him into base jumping in a squirrel suit
- His skills kept increasing through diligent training that he sought out to get himself into this flow channel → kept increasing the challenges
- When the challenge is above your skill → anxiety
- The two things you can do to reduce that anxiety is to
- reduce the challenge (go back to a much easier task)
- increase your skills
- is much easier to temporarily reduce the challenge
- Eg Canadian woman who died on Mt. Everest
- she decided that the challenge she was going to set herself was going to be very high even though she had almost no skills
- Both challenges and skills are perceived
34
How could Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs play into why people climb mountains?
- Self-actualization
- When we look at the early climbers in the 1800s and 1900s they came from relatively wealth families and were out doing these interesting things bc in a lot of ways, their physiological needs were met → eg sherpas are climbing in mountains to get money to buy food, water, shelter for their families
35
What are other reasons people climb mountains?
- A lot of it is to do with this intrinsic motivation, the need to gradually and systematically increase the challenge as the skills go and accomplish that outcome and get yourself into that flow area
- - They could say hat there is that need to achieve → an inherent personality trait bc the intrinsic motivation will not talk about a personality or personality trait
- some ppl will think that they are high achievers and will put that in as a trait to people.
- Self-interpretation vs. Psychological theory
- A need to achieve
- Or was there a theory to it? → was it a challenge that matched exactly the skill level that you had and you progressively moved through either mountains or any other activity that you do?
- Eg video games and video gaming behaviour → based on these things
- Reason he climbed the mountain was:
- was so he could say he did it.
36
Are mountain static or dynamic landscapes?
- Mountains are dynamic landscapes
- tectonic movement is pushing them ever upwards while erosion and gravity is pulling them back down to the ground.
- They’re ever hammered by extreme weather and the vertical relief found in mountains means that materials are constantly moving through them, coursing downstream and carving and denuding as go.
37
What are Snow Avalanches?
- **Snow Avalanches** - the sudden release and movement of vast amounts of snow down a mountainside, under the influence of gravity.
- They’re one of the most destructive forces in nature.
- Killing thousands of people over the centuries. → if mountains were more heavily populated, the toll would be even greater.
- As the number of people living and recreating in mountains increases, potential for avalanche danger increases as well.
- People have long recognized avalanches as a significant natural hazard.
- Early records from the European Alps, for example, reveal considerable avalanche destruction. → their avalanches became a sizable problem between the 16th and the 18th centuries when increasing population and widespread cutting of mountain forests coincided with increased snowfall in the glacial advance associated with the **Little Ice Age**.
- One of the great disasters came later during the First World War when a series of enormous snow-slides on the Austrian-Italian front killed 10,000 soldiers in a single day.
- North America: the first major problems with avalanches arose during the 1800s gold rush era, when prospectors flooded into the Mountain West and numerous mining towns were established.
- Canada: first recorded avalanche fatalities were not from the west side of the country, but rather the east.
- In the winter of 1782, 22 people lost their lives to an avalanche in an Inuit settlement near Nain, Newfoundland and Labrador.
- Founded in 1771, Nain is the most northern and largest community in Nunatsievud and the gateway to **Torngat Mountains National Park**.
38
When was the deadliest avalanche in Canada?
- Deadliest avalanche in Canada: March 4, 1910, 58 workers were killed as they were clearing away a section of railway in Rogers Pass, the height of the Columbia Mountains in British Columbia.
- the rail line had been covered by an earlier avalanche when another slide came down on top of the workers. → is not an anomaly today.
39
How does an avalanche happen?
- When snow falls in mountains, it accumulates in layers within the **snowpack** - the total amount of snow on the ground.
- Different weather conditions and snowfall events create different types of layers of snow over the course of a winter season.
- The stability of a snowpack is influenced by how well different layers of snow adhere to one another and the surface upon which they fell.
- This bond and anchorage of snow layers is called **shear strength**, and it resists the downslope force of gravity, which is called **shear stress**.
- When shear stress outweighs the shear strength, an unstable mass of snow breaks loose, creating a snow avalanche.
40
What are the Two Principle Types of Snow Avalanches?
1. Loose-Snow Avalanche
2. Slab Avalanche
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What is a Loose-Snow Avalanche?
Loose-Snow Avalanches
- have very little internal cohesion, hence the name “loose snow”
- sometimes call point-release avalanches bc they start when a small amount of loose snow, slips and begins to slide down a slope, setting additional snow in motion.
- so these avalanches initiate at a point and tend to grow wider as they slide.
- Occur much more frequently in freshly fallen snow on steep slopes.
- They are generally shallow, small and cause little damage and scores of these slides can occur during a single snowstorm.
- In the spring, when the snow is wet and heavy, loose snow avalanches can gain enough momentum and mass to cause serious damage and so they’re not to be taken lightly.
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What are Slab Avalanches?
Slab Avalanches
- Occur much less frequently but are considerably more dangerous
- Occur when a plate or a slab of cohesive snow begins to slide as a unit before breaking up.
- For a slab avalanche to occur, you generally need 4 things:
1. You need a slab of snow, which is typically a dense mass (2) sitting upon a weak layer, or a layer of less cohesive strength.
2. So the slab, sitting on top of a weak layer, has to be on a
3. steep slope. (slopes typically steeper than 30 degrees) → the majority of avalanches occur on slopes from 36 to 39 degrees.
- slopes that are steeper than 60 degrees typically can’t hold snow bc they’re too steep, continuous sloughing keeps them fairly clean.
4. You need a trigger.
- Slab avalanches can lie teetering on the verge of release sometimes for days, even months.
- The weak layers beneath the slabs can be extremely sensitive and any rapid addition of weight or stress can initiate a failure in a slope that would have not avalanched otherwise.
- Most avalanches are triggered when slopes are loaded by additional or new snow.
- Can originate in all types of snow, from old to freshly fallen snow, from dry snow to wet snow.
- The chief distinguishing characteristic is that snow breaks away with enough internal cohesion to act as a single unit it disaggregates or breaks up during its downslope journey.
- The area of release is marked by a distinctive upper fracture line, or **crown**, which is perpendicular to the slope and extends down to a well-defined sliding surface or **bed surface**.
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What is a natural trigger?
For a slab avalanche, Additional or new snow is referred to as a natural trigger.
- Other types of natural triggers:
- warming temperatures
- rainfall
- rockfall
- earthquake
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What are artificial triggers for slab avalanches?
- Sometimes all it takes for one avalanche is just the weight of one person.
- In fact, majority of avalanches that injury or bury ppl are triggered by ppl.
- Wildlife too can trigger avalanches
→ these are examples of **artificial triggers**.
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What does the Size of a Slab Avalanche?
- Depends on a lot of factors, but it’s often confined to a specific area on the slope bc of the nature of the terrain.
- During times of extreme instability, whole mountainsides may become involved with fracture lines racing along everywhere for several kilometres, releasing numerous avalanches down several different paths.
- Slab avalanches can be very destructive to vegetation or anything else in their path.
- You can see where avalanches typically run, at or below a tree line, a slide passer, a common feature on the landscape, immediately recognizable due to their lack of trees.
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What are Avalanche Paths 3 major sections or zones?
1. **The starting zone** → the uppermost part of the avalanche path
- for a loose snow avalanche, it’s where the first snow grains start to move downhill.
- For a slab avalanche it’s where that crown in located.
2. Track → the area within which a particular avalanche travels and the track is obviously downhill of the starting zone and is usually treeless or it has less trees or smaller trees than the surrounding vegetation.
3. Runout Zone → where the debris from the avalanche accumulates at the bottom of the slope.
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What are Avalanche Speeds like?
- Can range widely
- **Dry Slides** → 50-200km/hr
- when dry, flowing avalanches exceed 35km an hour, a dust or powder cloud of airborne particles of snow is created and it moves about the denser flowing part of the avalanche.
- The forces are greatest in that dense flowing part of the avalanche, but if the slide is big enough, **air blasts** from a powder cloud can travel fast enough to explode lungs if caught by the full impact of the blast.
- The can cause damage well beyond the normal avalanche zone.
- The extreme violence inside the flowing debris grinds up snow into even finer and finer particles.
- even if the snow started out light and fluffy, it can become very dense by the time it finally comes to a stop.
- Small grains **sinter,** or coalesce, much more quickly than large grains.
- And the tiny grains making up avalanche debris can sinter as much as 10,000x faster than the larger grains of the initial slab.
- All the kinetic energy liberated on the way down heats snow just enough to create water on the surface of the ice grains.
- It’s for all these reasons, it’s easy to seize why avalanche debris seizes up like concrete the instant it comes to a stop.
- **Wet Snow Avalanche** → tend to generally slide at much slower seeds with no particular dust cloud, but their impressive mass can still cause great damage.
- This is especially the case in the spring with large **climax avalanches** when the whole of the season’s snowpack may release right down to the ground.
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What is Jeff's views on avalanche safety and how Glacier National Park deals with these threats?
- Snow safety program is really important in Glacier National Park bc we have a very important transportation corridor that comes through the Trans-Canada Highway and the CPR main line that connects the east and west of Canada.
- We also have the mountainous terrain: 134 avalanche paths within a 40km stretch of highway.
- We get up to 14m of snow up at tree line an average per season.
- Mitigate hazards by:
- Avalanche forecasting
- do a number of observations: weather, snowpack and avalanche observations.
- weather is looking at snowfall, precipitation, temperatures and wind speeds and direction.
- for avalanches they’re looking at our avalanches running, how far they are running, how large they could be, snow cover.
- we’re looking at the layer in the snowpack and looking for weak layers, testing those weak layers to see if they’re likely to trigger into an avalanche.
- Static defenses
- eg. an Avalanche Snow Shed
- they have 5 in the area
- they are key to keeping the highway open in the winter
- the way they’re designed: there’s an avalanche path above and there’s avalanche berms on either side that channel the avalanche debris over the snowshed and that allows the avalanche to pass over the snowshed and not bury the highway.
- active artillery control program
- eg. 105mm howitzer
- is actually a museum piece
- Parks Canada does the avalanche forecasting and snow science, but the military actually fires and maintains the weapons. → they will operate the weapons and fire the artillery up into the mountains, to our avalanche start zones and bring the avalanches and snow down.
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What are Landslides?
- **Landslides** - downslope movement of rock and debris
- occur when **shear stress** within a slope outweighs the **shear strength** of a slope’s rock or sediment layers, ultimately causing the slope to fail.
- The shear strength of any given slope is usually increased with vegetation.
- Alpine vegetation can act as a barrier to slow downslope movement, but can also act as a natural anchor for the soils.
- Slopes with smooth surfaces, like rock for example, conversely have very low **frictional strength** making them slippery.
- This decreases the shear strength of a slope.
- Add a lubricant, like water, to the mix and the frictional strength of slopes decreases further.
- Streams and rivers are particularly effective at undercutting slopes making them steeper and more prone to failure.
50
How do human activities also influence the likelihood of landslides?
- Clear-cutting forests, for example, the mass removal of vegetation, radically decreases slope stability.
- Other human activities like mining, road construction, and home building may also undercut or overload slopes.
51
How do we often classify landslides?
- We often classify them based on their
- material composition
- water content
- movement (how they move down a slope)
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What are the 6 different types of Landslides?
- 6 different types:
- Rock falls
- Topples
- Translational Slides
- Rotational Slides
- Earth Flows
- Debris Flows
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What are the characteristics of Rock Falls and Topple Landslides?
- Most basic type of landslides
- Occur when rocks suddenly detach from slopes.
- Both tend to occur on very steep slopes with exposed, bare rock.
- The extreme steepness of a slope, which may be vertical or even undercut, will cause the rock to eventually failure.
- This failure may be the result of weathering or by faulting of the rock and is often triggered by rain or **freeze and thaw cycles**.
- Freeze and thaw cycles can eventually cause expansion in cracking and failure of rocks.
- The resulting masses of broke rock may travel for some distance by sliding or rolling down slope.
Rock Falls
- Occur when a rock detaches and falls freely, bounces or rolls down slope.
Topples
- When a large piece of bedrock falls off a slope and rotates end over end.
- One of the largest rock falls in Canadian history happened in the spring of 1903 when **Turtle Mountain** in the southern Alberta Rockies partially collapsed.
- Around 82 million tonnes of limestone fell into the valley below, burying most of the town of Frank and killing around 80 people.
- Multiple factors led to the rockslide, but Turtle Mountain’s unstable geology was the primary cause.
- Tectonic shifting during the creation of the Rocky Mountains caused structurally stronger rock layers to sit on top of weaker ones. → water seeped into the mountain through surface cracks, eroding the limestone.
- When it froze and thawed, those cracks widened, breaking apart the rock from the inside.
- In addition, the structure of the mountain was inherently weak bc the base of the mountain had been undercut for thousands of years by glaciers and then the Crowsnest River.
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What are Translation and Rotational Landslides?
- Occur when a plane of weakness or a failure surface in the rock or sediment causes an overlying consolidated mass to move downslope along the surface of the rupture.
- Tend to happen in unconslidated sediment, like clay, sand or silt.
- Are often triggered by increased moisture within the rock or sediments or by an earthquake.
- A distinctive characteristic of these types of landslide are a steep **head-scarp**
- **scarp** - steep, nearly vertical region of exposed soil and rock at the head of the landslide where the failure surface ruptures the ground surface.
- Whether is slide is rotational or translation depends on how it moves down the slope.
- If a failure surface runs parallel to the slope, the slide is TRANSLATIONAL.
- If it’s (the failure surface) curved or concaved upwards, the moving material will rotate as it moves, causing a **rotational landslide**.
- which is also called a **slump**.
- Easily differentiated from translational slides because the material involved in the rotational slide often remains as an intact block that will preserve its original structure.
- the vegetation and tress on top of a rotational slide tend to tilt backwards and towards the slope due to the rotation of the entire block.
- Therefore, the vegetation and trees growing on top of the translation slide will retain their original orientation.
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What is a Rotational Landslide?
- - Occur when a plane of weakness or a failure surface in the rock or sediment causes an overlying consolidated mass to move downslope along the surface of the rupture.
- Tend to happen in unconslidated sediment, like clay, sand or silt.
- Are often triggered by increased moisture within the rock or sediments or by an earthquake.
- A distinctive characteristic of these types of landslide are a steep **head-scarp**
- **scarp** - steep, nearly vertical region of exposed soil and rock at the head of the landslide where the failure surface ruptures the ground surface.
- If it’s (the failure surface) curved or concaved upwards, the moving material will rotate as it moves, causing a **rotational landslide**.
- which is also called a **slump**.
- Easily differentiated from translational slides because the material involved in the rotational slide often remains as an intact block that will preserve its original structure.
- the vegetation and tress on top of a rotational slide tend to tilt backwards and towards the slope due to the rotation of the entire block.
- Therefore, the vegetation and trees growing on top of the translation slide will retain their original orientation.
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What is a Translational Landslide?
- Occur when a plane of weakness or a failure surface in the rock or sediment causes an overlying consolidated mass to move downslope along the surface of the rupture.
- Tend to happen in unconslidated sediment, like clay, sand or silt.
- Are often triggered by increased moisture within the rock or sediments or by an earthquake.
- A distinctive characteristic of these types of landslide are a steep **head-scarp**
- **scarp** - steep, nearly vertical region of exposed soil and rock at the head of the landslide where the failure surface ruptures the ground surface.
- If a failure surface runs parallel to the slope, the slide is translational.
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What is an Earth-Flow Landslide?
Earthflows
- Involve the fluid-like movement of fine sediments down slope.
- Occur when slopes made of unconsolidated sediments become water-saturated.
- This hazard is present when unconsolidated sediments overlie an impenetrable layer which prevents water drainage.
- When water saturates the sediment, it forces the grains apart, increasing friction and allowing them to flow down slope.
- Unlike the other landslides, earth flows don’t necessarily move along a well-defined failure plane.
- Depending on what the slope is made of and how much water is in the sediment, earthflows can happen very quickly, sometimes over hours or slowly over years.
- Very gradual, downslope movements when little water is present are often referred to as **earth creeps** rather than earth flows.
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What are Debris Flows Landslides?
- Debris flows are similar to Earth Flow and that they involve the fluid-like movement downslope, but while earth flows are mostly comprised of fine sediments; debris flows are composed of larger sediments, stuff like rocks and boulders, making them the most dangerous type of landslides.
- They are usually triggered by a large influx of water into the system. They often follow a heavy or long-lasting precipitation events.
- Debris flows and fast-moving and can travel far
- They often flow downhill following courses of mountain streams and rivers, but can initiate anywhere on a slope where sediment is sufficiently water-saturated.
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What approaches are used to mitigate damage caused by landslides?
- To protect roads and railways, rockfall shelters and tunnels are often constructed in areas of highest risk.
- Another option is **Drape nets** across vertical rock cliffs
- **Catchment fences** to catch rockfalls.
- Levees are build along streams that are prone to debris flows to prevent them from overflowing on to the land.
- Diversion structures may also be constructed to deflect landslides and redirect them away from communities and infrastructure.
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What approaches are used to prevent landslides from happening in the first place?
- Metal anchors can be inserted into mountainsides to reinforce and stabilize rock masses.
- Ditches, culverts and drains are built to facilitate drainage and prevent water from accumulating in high-risk areas.
- Tree planting is also used to help stabilize slopes
61
How are Volcanoes formed?
- Volcanoes can form at convergent plate boundaries.
- Here, subduction zones often form where one plate is driven beneath another into the mantle of the Earth.
- The heat of the mantle melts the crust of the subducting plate, turning it into magma and magma, because it’s less dense than the surrounding mantle, rise towards the surface of the earth.
- If the magma erupts through the overriding plate, it produces a volcano.
- Divergent plate boundaries, where plates are separating, may also expose the hot mantle, which melt in upwells to form volcanoes.
- Volcanoes can form along hotspots, where disturbances in the mantle produce hot plumes that rise to the surface.
- Hot spots are not necessarily associated with plate boundaries and often occur within a plate.
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What is the significance of magma in building volcanoes?
- Different types of volcanoes are formed by different types of magma
- One of the most abundant elements in magma is **silica** and magma types are defined by their silica content.
- The amount of silica in magma determines its **viscosity** or its ability to flow.
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What is Basaltic Magma?
- Magma formed by upwelling, melted mantle has low silica content and low viscosity, meaning that it flows easily.
- This type of magma is called **basaltic magma**, and contains high amounts of iron and magnesium, making it dark in colour.
- Basaltic magma reaches the Earth’s surface without passing through continental crust, and when basaltic magma reaches the Earth’s surface’s lava, it cools to form a type of rock called **basalt**.
- Basaltic magma occurs at divergent plate boundaries because magma derived from melted mantle rises to directly fill the gaps separating the plates.
- Hot spots on Oceanic plates also consist of basaltic magma.
- The Sverdefos Waterfall in Skaftafell National Park in Southern Iceland is a formation as a result of basaltic magma eruptions.
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What is Rhyolitic Magma?
- Has high silica content and low levels of iron and magnesium, making it a lighter colour.
- Rhyolitic magma is formed when basaltic magma rises through the continental crust which is mainly composed of silica-rich granite rock.
- As the magma rises, it melts the surrounding granite, increasing its silica content and viscosity, making it thick and sticky.
- When the Rhyolitic magma reaches the earth’s surface lava, it cools to form **rhyolite rock**.
- Rhyolitic magma is most likely produced by volcanoes that arise in subductions zones and hot spots on continental plates because in both of these cases, the magma must pass through a continent plate before reaching the Earth’s surface.
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How do different types of magma produce different types of volcanoes?
- Viscosity!
- Viscosity determines how well lava flows once it’s erupted, influencing the shape of the volcano.
- Viscosity also influences how easily gas that is trapped in the magma can escape which influences the explosiveness of the eruption.
- Magma that’s contained in gas that can’t escape easily leads to more explosive eruptions.
- Because there is a gradient in the silica content and the viscosity of magma, there exist other intermediary types of volcanoes. Such as
- Cinder Cone Volcanoes
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What are Shield Volcanoes?
- Volcanoes produced by basaltic magma are called shield volcanoes, bc they’re shaped like a warrior’s shield.
- The low viscosity of basaltic magma means that the resulting lava is relatively fluid, allowing it to slide easily down slope and travelling down a large area before cooling and solidifying into basalt rock.
- This creates broad, gentle sloping volcanoes.
- The low viscosity of basaltic magma also allows gas to escape fairly easily, so eruptions tend to be mild.
- Shield volcanoes are found worldwide.
- Eg. the Hawaiian and Galapagos Islands are good examples.
- Eg. Tamu Massif, an extinct submarine shield volcano located in northwestern Pacific Ocean.
- The possibility of its nature as a single volcano was announced recently in 2013 and if corroborated, would make Tamu Massif the largest known volcano on Earth.
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What is a Stratovolcano?
- Produced by rhyolitic magma.
- The high viscosity of rhyolitic magma means that the resulting lava does not spread far before cooling.
- As a result, the lava piles up forming steep conical shapes that we often attribute to volcanoes.
- The high viscosity of the thick, rhyolitic magma also strongly traps gas, causing internal pressure to build and build until the point when the gas is explosively released upon eruption.
- Eg. Krakatoa (best known for its catstrophic eruption in 1883)
- Eg. Vesuvius (famous for its destruction of the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD.
- → Both eruptions claimed thousands of lives
- Eg. Mount St. Helens and Mount Pinatubo erupted catastrophically.
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What is a Cinder Cone Volcano?
- Because there is a gradient in the silica content and the viscosity of magma, there exist other intermediary types of volcanoes. Such as
- Cinder Cone Volcanoes
Cinder Cone Volcanoes
- Most famous Cinder Cone is Paricutin in Mexico (grew our of a cornfield in 1943 from a new vent)
- Eruptions continued for 9 years, built the cone to a height of 424m and produced lava flows that covered 25km.
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What are the Volcanic Hazards?
- Lava flows
- Volcanic Ash
- Pyroclastic flows
- Lahars
- Tsunamis
- Release of carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide (GHG, volcanic winter)
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What are lava flows?
- First volcanic hazard is **lava flows** - when lava pours from a volcano and moves down slope.
- Lava flows destroy everything in their path and they’re almost impossible to stop.
- Eg. the eruption of Kilauea, which forms part of Hawaii has been ongoing since 1983, since then, the continuous flow of lava has resurfaced over 125 square km of land, buried about 14km of main highway and destroyed over 200 homes.
- The intense heat of lava flows can even burn areas not in their direct paths.
- But lava flows are considered the least hazardous volcanic process bc they’re usually not-life threatening.
- Usually, lava flows at a rate that is slow enough that people can be evacuated before it reaches communities.
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What is Volcanic Ash?
- **Volcanic Ash** - is produced by explosive eruptions.
- When gas explodes out of magma, the magma shatters and is propelled into the air where it cools and solidifies into various small shards of glass and rock, producing volcanic ash.
- Therefore, volcanic ash is heavy and abrasive.
- If volcanic gas is projected high enough, it can reach the **stratosphere** (upper layer of the Earth’s atmosphere)
- Here it can travel thousands of kilometres, having far-reaching effects.
- In particular, it can produce ash clouds that block incoming solar radiation and can have a temporary cooling effect on the planet.
- Volcanic ash can coat just about everything, destroying infrastructure and crops, often with large economic impacts.
- It becomes very heavy when wet, turning into a thick sludge which can collapse roofs.
- Volcanic ash also poses a danger to the aviation industry because it can clog airplane engines.
- Eg. April 2010, the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland severely affected air traffic in Europe. It grounded airplanes across Europe for a week, stranding millions of airline passengers, and costing the aviation industry almost $3 billion.
- Volcanic ash also bad for the health of humans and animals:
- If inhaled, it causes breathing problems and can ultimately lead to suffocation.
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What are Pyroclastic Flows?
- **Pyroclastic flows**: in addition to volcanic ash, an explosive eruption can create **pyroclastic flows**, when hot masses of gas and rock fragments are ejected and moved down slope.
- Compared to lava flows, pyroclastic flows are much more dangerous.
- They travel down slope extremely fast, reaching speeds moving away from a volcano of up to 700km per hour.
- They are also really hot, reaching hundreds of degrees Celsius.
- As a result, they’re very difficult to escape from and are often deadly, destroying everything in their path.
- Eg. Deadly 1902 eruption of Mount Pelee on the coast of Martinique in the Caribbean created pyroclastic flows that buried the town of St. Pierre, killing 30,000 people.
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What is a Lahar?
- One of the greatest dangers a volcano presents is not the direct result of material that’s ejected. The height of many volcanoes means that they are often covered in snow and ice, and the heat of an eruption can cause them to rapidly melt with catastrophic consequences.
- The melting of snow and glaciers can create a volcano-triggered version of a debris flow, called a **lahar**.
- A lahar is triggered when large amounts of water released from the melting snow and ice mix with the loose volcanic rock and ash on the flanks of the volcano.
- This mixture pours into creeks and rivers that flow down slope, causing their channels to overflow.
- The consistency of a lahar has been described as wet cement and they’re often very hot, causing burn injuries to their victims.
- Lahars are not as fast as pyroclastic flows but like other downslope hazards, they bury and destroy everything in their path and can be extremely dangerous because people of course tend to build their communities near rivers and creeks.
- Lahars don’t require a large eruption to be triggered.
- Eg. one of the greatest lahar disasters occurred in 1985, when Nevada del Ruiz erupted in Columbia, and although not a large eruption, it melted the volcanoes summit glaciers and triggered a series of lahars that ran down the rivers that originated in the region.
- These lahars destroyed several communities built along the rivers and killed approximately 23,000 people.
- Since mountains are often the source of major rivers and waterways. Lahars thus have the potential to have far-reaching impacts.
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What are tsunamis?
- Other potential hazards when volcanoes erupt near water is the displacement of large volumes of seawater, which can generate large waves called **tsunamis**.
- Eg. Krakatoa eruption in Indonesia in 1883 → When that volcano erupted, it collapsed into the surrounding ocean and created massive tsunamis that inundated the surrounding coastal areas, killing more than 36,000 people.
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What is perhaps the greatest impact volcanic eruptions have through history?
- their release of gas into the atmosphere.
- Most of the gas that’s released in a volcanic eruption is relatively harmless. → eg. water vapour
- Two gases that are ejected from volcanic eruptions, **carbon dioxide** and **sulphur dioxide**, have important impacts on the Earth’s climate.
- The bigger the eruption, or the longer it continues, the more gas is ejected.
- Carbon dioxide that’s released from volcanoes is an important component of the Earth’s climate. Bc it’s a greenhouse gas → we learned previosuly that the Earth itself is the source of most of the heat on our planet. It traps incoming solar radiation and radiates heat back into the atmosphere.
- The heat that’s radiated from the Earth is then absorbed by **greenhouse gases** in the atmosphere, which lock in the heat.
- Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, regulate the Earth’s climate. Without them the Earth would be too cold to support life.
- However, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is a very delicate balance and volcanoes have been essential to maintaining this balance for over 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history.
- Carbon dioxide is taken up by plants through photosynthesis, where carbon is then stored in their tissues, and over long periods of time, as plants and animals are buried into the Earth, carbon is **sequestered**, or stored, for a long time in coal beds and rocks.
- If this process continued on unchecked, carbon dioxide levels would get so low that the Earth would essentially freeze.
- However, volcanic activity recycles carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.
- When the sediments that have sequestered carbon dioxide are subducted into the mantle, carbon dioxide is released into magma, where it will eventually erupt back into the atmosphere.
- Sulphur dioxide also affects the Earth’s climate, but on a shorter time scale than carbon dioxide.
- Once erupted, sulphur dioxide reacts with water vapour to produce sulphuric acid. → Sulphuric acid then falls to Earth as acid rain, which can have harmful impacts on plants and animals, human health.
- In addition, the corrosive nature of sulphuric acid causes the outside of buildings to deteriorate and to disintegrate.
- Like volcanic ash, if an eruption is explosive enough, sulphur dioxide can reach the stratosphere where it can travel to widespread locations. → here it can stay aloft in the atmosphere for several years.
- Importantly, the high albedo of sulphuric acid reflects incoming solar energy back into space, which can cause temporary cooling of the Earth’s climate.
- Decreased global temperatures caused by sulphuric acid, and to a lesser extent, volcanic ash, is called a **volcanic winter**.
- One such event occurred recently following the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines.
- During the two years following the eruption, the average global temperature fell by almost a degree celsius.
- Volcanic winters also tend to produce stunning sunsets and it’s believed that the fantastic skies seen in the background of Edward Munk’s famous painting, “The Scream” were inspired by the sunsets created by the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa.
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What are the biggest mountain hazard associated with winter mountain travel?
Avalanches
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What are 5 things to remember if you're in avalanche terrain?
1. Get the Gear
- Everyone headed into avalanche terrain needs to carry a full complement of rescue gear.
- This includes:
- an avalanche transceiver, a probe, and a shovel as an absolute minimum
- in the event of a burial, the transceiver gets you close to the victim, the probe finds them, and the shovel is what gets them out.
- There’s now strong evidence to support the value of avalanche airbag backpacks in reducing the chance of burial, and wearing a helmet will protect your head from trauma if you’re caught.
2. Get the Training
- Carrying rescue gear lacks effectiveness if you don’t know how to use it.
- Taking an avalanche skills training course will not only give you the basic skills to use the gear properly, but you’ll also learn about what terrain to seek out and what to avoid.
- Take a course and then practice what you’ve learned.
3. Get the Forecast
- Many of the popular areas for winter recreation have an avalanche forecast for the region.
- Public avalanche forecasters are the pros. They do their utmost to provide you with the best possible info about what you may encounter on your adventure.
4. Get the Picture
- Be aware, eyes open, ears perked, trying to see, hear and feel what the mountains are telling us.
- Look for recent avalanches, listen for cracking or woofing that’s taking place around you.
- These signs indicate the failure of weak layers in the snowpack.
- Be aware of recent snow storms, wind loading or signs of rapid thawing.
- Mountains often give us clues that foreshadow the potential hazards you may be exposed to.
- At the most basic level: be aware of terrain steepness. → remember that avalanches predominantly occur on slopes over 30 degrees.
5. Get out of Harm’s Way
- Make sound travel decisions when you’re out in avalanche terrain.
- It’s best to avoid suspect slopes and terrain to begin with.
- Don’t regroup in avalanche paths or run-out zones.
- The less time you spend exposed, the better.
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What happened in "A Dozen More Turns" Doc?
- - Galatin Avalanche Centre Issued a backcountry avalanche advisory on January 1st at 7:30am for the Gallatin and Madison ranges south of Big Sky, the lion areas near West Yellowstone, the mountains around Cook City and the Washburn range in Northern Yellowstone National Park → New snow of the last few days has been deposited on an extremely weak snow pack
- avalanche danger considered high on all slopes
His friend skiied along a rock fin, which ultimately started the avalanche.
- In order to have an avalanche need 4 things
1. Slab of snow (typically sth dense)
2. sitting on top of a weak layer (weaker than the slab)
3. slab sitting on the weak layer has to be on a steep slope (slopes steeper than 30 degrees, most slab avalanches happened between 37 and 38 degrees)
4. a trigger such as more snow (adding weight and stress to the snowpack → it can fail and crack) or human trigger
- One of the major concerns was dehydration → they had no idea how much blood Sam was losing bc he was in a sleeping bag with a whole bandage so the sleeping bag was absorbing some of it
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In "A Dozen More Turns" Doc, what was the cause of the avalanche?
- Snowpack wise what happened: they had just issued an avalanche warning for an area adjacent to where they were that there was a high avalanche danger on all avalanche terrain → any slope above 30 degrees
- reason for that was they buried a very weak layer of surface ore underneath which is now buried 2 ft under the surface with the storms and were seeing a lot of natural activity on that and were worried about human activity on that
- surface ore/water → forms on the snow’s surface and it forms when there is a cold, clear calm night.
- it’s basically frozen dew and often times they manifest themselves as big, feathery crystals of snow
- the reason they’re such a problem as far as stability in the snow pack certaintly isn’t when it’s on the surface, it’s when it gets buried → it’s one of the layers that is the most deadly weak layer → a lot of the times the fractures associated with buried surface water tend to propagate across the slopes → so the fracture may occur several feet above you
- When he went up to the crown line (where the avalanche broke away from the slope) it was an open area that was wind-loaded and when he dug down, there was the surface water layer.
- the prime slope angle was 37 degrees
- the reason the weak layer of surface water was found above in this kind of open area and now down in the trees is that’s the kind of nature of how it’s formed: need a kind of colder, clean night. It’s formed a few weeks prior and in the trees it’s too shaded from the night sky and the surface water doens’t form.
