Pete_N
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, CA
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Topic Author's Original Post - Apr 28, 2016 - 01:34pm PT
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160115085333.htm
The link, above, leads to a rather poor summary of a paper published in December last year by Arnaud Temme (Using Climber's Guidebooks to Assess Rock Fall Patterns Over Large Spatial and Decadal Temporal Scales: An Example from the Swiss Alps. Geografiska Annaler: Series A, Physical Geography 2015 97(4):793-807).
I was intrigued by the summary, especially some of the reported conclusions (eg higher risk of rockfall associated w granite faces), and skimmed the original paper. If anyone's interested in the original and can't get it, let me know--I'm happy to send you a pdf.
Temme used climbing guidebooks written over a 146 year period to assess potential changes in the probability of rockfall on selected routes in the Bernese Alps. I thought it was a pretty cool idea and seems to have been executed pretty well. I'm not convinced, still, that granite peaks are inherently more dangerous than limestone ones (for example), but it's a tempting conclusion, looking at some of Temme's results. The author admits that these results "...may be specific to this case study." I think that's quite likely! It doesn't appear that he controlled for types of climbs (faces, ridges, slopes, couloirs and pillars) either--I could be wrong, though as I read the paper very quickly.
In any case, I thought it was an interesting study and worth a look.
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