Snow scientist to deliver next lecture in Provost’s Distinguished Lecturer Series will take place at 7pm in the Museum of the Rockies’ Hager Auditorium
From MSU News Service
When Ed Adams headed west after college in 1974 for a winter of carving turns at Utah’s legendary Alta Ski Area, “it was a big, big snow year,” he recalled.
The powder-filled slopes delighted Adams and his fellow skiers but also inflicted deadly force in the form of avalanches. One massive slide hammered the lodge where he was living, blasting cars across the parking lot as if they were toys.
Adams quickly learned to respect snow’s power, especially as he and his friends increasingly turned to the backcountry in pursuit of the perfect run. One winter at Alta turned into many.
Then, as he started looking for something beyond the skiing lifestyle, a team of scientists from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers came to the Alta area to study snow. Adams volunteered to do some shovel work at their backcountry site.
“I just got fascinated,” he recalled. “They said, ‘If you want to do this, you ought to think about going back to school. … The best place in the world to do that is Montana State University.’”
Within a year he arrived in Bozeman. More or less starting over from his bachelor’s in English, he earned a bachelor’s in Earth sciences at MSU, then a master’s and Ph.D. in engineering, all the while researching how snow works.
After a short stint researching at Michigan Technological University, where he helped develop the Institute of Snow Research, Adams was hired onto the faculty at MSU in 1992. Over the next 20 years, as backcountry skiing grew in popularity and the need to understand avalanches grew with it, his work was featured by National Geographic, The New York Times and the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.
Now a distinguished professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at MSU, Adams consults weekly with ski patrollers and avalanche forecasters around Montana and beyond. And snow continues to surprise him.
“It’s constantly changing,” he said. “It’s very, very dynamic.”
That will be the focus of his December 5th presentation, “The Perpetually Evolving Structure of a Snowpack.” The talk, which is the second in MSU’s annual Provost’s Distinguished Lecturer Series, will take place at 7pm in the Museum of the Rockies’ Hager Auditorium and will be followed by a reception.
“Ed is an internationally recognized expert,” said Dan Miller, who has collaborated with Adams on snow science work and is currently the head of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. “In the snow science and avalanche community, everybody knows him, and that’s because of the great research he’s conducted for decades.”
Kevin Hammonds, an assistant professor who joined the Department of Civil Engineering this year, said he was attracted to MSU by the quality of the snow science program that Adams has led the past many years and the world-class research facilities he has helped to develop.
Adams’ presentation will likely hold some surprises for the person whose primary relationship with snow is shoveling it off the sidewalk or riding it downhill.
“Snow is a very warm material from an engineering perspective. It’s actually hot,” he said. That’s because engineers define material warmth as the proximity to melting point, and snow — which is really just particles of water ice — is always relatively close to melting compared to a material like steel.
“I based a lot of my (Ph.D. research) on stuff that came out of the nuclear industry, because they were looking at very high temperatures and how materials change,” he said.
Thinking about snow conjures images of snowflakes, but snow comes in myriad forms, including cube-shaped crystals and cup-shaped granules, Adams said.
And that’s just what he calls the “microstructure.” A snowpack is made of multiple layers, each ever-changing in response to fluctuations in temperature, wind, sun and other variables.
Other civil engineers work with beams of steel or concrete, whose properties are relatively well-known because they have been tested extensively in conditions that can be easily controlled. The state-of-the-art Subzero Science and Engineering Research Facility, housed in MSU’s College of Engineering, allows Adams and his fellow researchers to study snow in that way — to an extent. But much of the science happens in the mountains, observing snow in its ever-changing natural conditions.
“With snow, I can quantify its properties and then come back a couple days later, and it’s a different material — the structure of it has actually changed,” he said. “You’re always trying to get ahead of it.”
Getting ahead of it, predicting what the snowpack will do, is what can keep a backcountry skier, snowboarder or snowmobiler alive. Other implications of Adams’ research are planning for and controlling avalanches at mines, highways and mountain towns.
At its most basic level, Adams said, snow is like the shapeshifter found in trickster myths worldwide, a creature that can take on different forms and move fluidly between realms.
That’s what makes snow so interesting, Adams said. “We’ll never completely understand it.” •