Why do old people call heavy snow "white death"?

However, heavy snow is also dangerous. Some people call it white death. ?

Bird, a poet in the Song Dynasty, once described the beauty and grandeur when it snowed with the poem "Three Million Jade Dragons in World War I, and the scales were scattered all over the sky". Snow can not only bring abundant water to the earth's homeland, but also cover mountains and rivers with silver and decorate the earth with beautiful scenery. However, why do some people call heavy snow "white death"?

At 8 o'clock on the evening of May 3 1, 1970, the snow and ice at the top of the northern peak of Vascalan Mountain in Peru suddenly began to collapse, and soon merged with the rocks to form a powerful snow and stone flow of more than 30 million cubic meters, roaring like a runaway wild horse at a speed of nearly 300 kilometers per hour. In an instant, the whole city was swallowed up by the snow and stone flow, killing more than 20 thousand residents and tens of thousands of livestock. This is by far the worst avalanche disaster in the world.

Avalanches have many reasons. The crystallization inside the snow layer and the formation of wet snow will affect the stability of the snow layer; The speed difference between the surface creep and the bottom creep of snow will cause the snow layer to break.

There are two main forms of disasters caused by heavy snow: avalanches and snowstorms. Avalanche is a phenomenon that snow slides down the mountain by gravity at the top of the mountain or the upper part of the snow-covered hillside. Temperature changes will also weaken the stability of snow; The strong wind will transfer a lot of snow to the ridge to form a snow eaves, which is also easy to collapse. These reasons create potential conditions, and once some external factors change, it will trigger an avalanche.