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"Let it go". Disney's Frozen animators help predict mechanics of avalanches
A MIND-BENDING AVALANCHE ANIMATION THAT COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE
https://www.wired.com/story/a-mind-bending-avalanche-animation/
Avalanches are awesome, in the classical sense of the word. In the most severe cases, tens of thousands of tons of snow accelerate from zero to 80 miles per hour in five seconds, obliterating pretty much everything but rock. Their violence boggles the human mind.
In particular, it boggles the minds of scientists trying to model that behavior. When an avalanche lets loose, its path of destruction depends on everything from the environment to the consistency of that snowpack. Icefall avalanches are essentially waterfalls of snow off a cliff, while glide avalanches move slowly, kind of like glaciers. But now, thanks in part to groundwork laid by the animators of Disney’s Frozen, researchers have simulated in awesome detail the moment a slab avalanche shears from a mountain. The rendering isn’t just hypnotic—it may well help develop better avalanche warning systems to keep humans away from one of nature’s most fearsome phenomena.
...
Scientists already knew this is what causes a slab avalanche, but Gaume is the first to build a modeling system to simulate the collapse of the weak layer. To do it, he began with a system that Disney animators have used to model snow, called a material point method, a kind of physics simulator that factors in things like gravity and deformation. These animators, though, weren’t necessarily interested in comprehensively modeling those physics. “Basically, the Disney model was done to make snow look good,” says Gaume. “It was physically based, but it was not validated with real data.”
So Gaume ventured into the field. As you can see in the GIF above, the team cut into snowpack, exposing a cross section, which they stuck black tracking dots on. They then sawed through the snowpack at the weak layer, which collapsed as a high-speed camera watched the dots. (Longer arrows mean more movement of the snow in that particular spot.) “We managed to really reproduce everything,” says Gaume. Things like the propagation speed of the crack, “and also all the displacement of these black dots, with a very good precision.”
In particular, it boggles the minds of scientists trying to model that behavior. When an avalanche lets loose, its path of destruction depends on everything from the environment to the consistency of that snowpack. Icefall avalanches are essentially waterfalls of snow off a cliff, while glide avalanches move slowly, kind of like glaciers. But now, thanks in part to groundwork laid by the animators of Disney’s Frozen, researchers have simulated in awesome detail the moment a slab avalanche shears from a mountain. The rendering isn’t just hypnotic—it may well help develop better avalanche warning systems to keep humans away from one of nature’s most fearsome phenomena.
...
Scientists already knew this is what causes a slab avalanche, but Gaume is the first to build a modeling system to simulate the collapse of the weak layer. To do it, he began with a system that Disney animators have used to model snow, called a material point method, a kind of physics simulator that factors in things like gravity and deformation. These animators, though, weren’t necessarily interested in comprehensively modeling those physics. “Basically, the Disney model was done to make snow look good,” says Gaume. “It was physically based, but it was not validated with real data.”
So Gaume ventured into the field. As you can see in the GIF above, the team cut into snowpack, exposing a cross section, which they stuck black tracking dots on. They then sawed through the snowpack at the weak layer, which collapsed as a high-speed camera watched the dots. (Longer arrows mean more movement of the snow in that particular spot.) “We managed to really reproduce everything,” says Gaume. Things like the propagation speed of the crack, “and also all the displacement of these black dots, with a very good precision.”
