EVALUATING A PROTOTYPE FIELD TEST FOR WEAK LAYER FRACTURE AND FAILURE PROPAGATION
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Researchers and practitioners currently lack a quantitative field test that indicates the propensity of a given slab and weak layer combination to propagate weak layer fracture and failure to an extent that leads to avalanching. We report on the development of such a test and the evaluation of a prototype test method. This test allows researchers to observe propagation and arrest away from the initial weak layer failure by extending the down slope dimension of the small column stability test. Weak layer failure is initiated by cutting the weak layer with a 2 mm thick snow saw either from the upslope or down slope end of the isolated column. Depending on slab and weak layer characteristics, weak layer fracture/failure propagates from the edge of the saw and propagates either to the end of the column, to an indistinct point, or to the vicinity of a fracture through the thickness of the slab. During the winter of 2006, University of Calgary researchers performed over 600 of these tests in the Columbia Mountains of British Columbia, Canada, and the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada. Results of our experiments allow for an evaluation of the relationship between isolated column length and cut length required to initiate propagation in this test. In addition, we evaluate the limited slope dependence and cut direction dependence of test results. We show that under certain conditions associated with nearby avalanche activity, a critical cut length emerges that is independent of slope angle; propagation under these conditions arrests only at the end of the isolated column. We discuss these results in terms of both shear fracture and weak layer collapse theoretical models.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".