An avalanche is a large mass of snow, ice, earth, rock, or other material occurring in swift motion down a mountainside or over a precipice (Webster's Third New International Dictionary). Avalanches can be classified, depending on their content, as snow and ice avalanches (q.v.), debris avalanches , and rock avalanches. Debris avalanches originate in incoherent earth materials and generally are wet; rock avalanches are derived directly from lithified bedrock, and although they may be wet, their movement does not depend on moisture. Although debris and rock avalanches are defined here as dynamic geologic processes, the same terms are applied to the deposits of these processes.
(1) Debris avalanchesare the rapid downslope flowage of masses of incoherent earth material. They are caused most frequently when a sudden influx of water reduces the shear strength of earth material on a steep slope, and they typically accompany cloudbursts in the mountains of the eastern United States (see...
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References
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Crandell, D.R. (1968). Avalanche . In: Geomorphology. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-31060-6_20
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